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I used to speed read fiction. I found that I would get a couple pages ahead of my understanding. As I aged, I realized that understanding a few books deeply is much more important than understanding a lot of books superficially.

Why read Hunter S. Thomson if you can't pull out the few awesome lines. When I raced through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I missed "And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back"

How many more of these did I miss? And this isn't even deep literature.




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