>Amen friend. I started them again a couple weeks ago and popped through the first three in a week!
A bit off-topic but how long does it take you to finish an average length book? Whenever I try to improve my reading speed I feel that I'm missing about 50% of what's happening in the plot not to mention I can't really get a feel for the quality of the prose at that speed.
I know I've been down the same road before, learning how to speed read and all that without actually getting any satisfying comprehension. Though, I would rarely get any satisfying comprehension at normal or slower reading speeds either, cause my mind would just doze off to sleep after about a page or two. Something about the internal conversion of written symbols to language has always been a bit of a bottleneck for me (and I'm not dyslexic), but it took me a while to put my finger on what it was that made reading such a chore for me, since I have always loved learning and absorbing information in other ways (I.e. talks/lectures). It didn't really click for me what the problem was until I started giving audiobooks a chance. It may seem weird, but prior to that, I had always felt like resorting to audio would be a bit like cheating, and would somehow make my experience of the material less 'genuine' than someone who could pick it up directly from the original source. Not to mention that speed reading seemed a lot faster/efficient than having somebody read to you.
Luckily, I got over that and realized that I could actually retain a miraculous about of information even when listening at 3x normal speeds, making my whole experience of the material a lot more vivid. Now I 'read' like a book or two a week using text-to-speech on my phone, and it's pretty awesome.
In retrospect, it's kinda funny cause I've always had auditory inclinations, like the fact that I had been a musician for almost 10 years when I realized that I'm not much of a visual learner.
I did have a day in there where I was left alone with the book for about 6 hours. How much can you read in 6 relatively uninterrupted hours?
The novels I'm talking about are about 300 pages in paperback. The reading level is not Peanuts, but it's also not Shakespeare.
By comparison, I read the World War Z book over the course of about a week, in bits. I found it very boring and wooden though. Motivation makes a big difference.
Yeah, but he has some interesting recommendations (apparently, just followed the link from here now).
Here in Norway, I'm fairly confident that quite a few great books will be "indefinitely" (at least as long as I would be able to care for my own books) available in libraries. And I see no pressing need to "own" such books -- unless they are truly close to my heart in some way.
But there are some great books, that are unjustifiably rare, and hard to get hold of -- four examples:
* Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling)
* The man who walked to the Moon (Howard McCord)
* Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams)
* Literary Machines (Ted Nelson)
The three first I've bought second hand, still looking for a reasonably priced version of the last one. Such books I enjoy having on my wall, if for no other reason, after recommending them to someone, I can lend them a copy.
But while I have a nice romantic, fuzzy attachment to dead tree books, I'm looking forward to moving towards a digital library. Still waiting for reasonably sized full colour (preferably e-ink) reader that has > 250 dpi and is suitable for both reading comics/graphic novels and books though...
