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I am not one, and frankly, I'm curious about the reading experience of those who are.
For me, a novel is a journey. Even when I blaze through a short book it takes me days. Over in the Jim Butcher thread people seem to be able to read s Dresden Files entry in a day. They are quick reads for me too - in that I read two or three hours each days and finish them in a week.
What I can't quite grasp is how people can wrap their heads around so much so quickly. A 300+ page book has so many different moments, scenes, characters, each scene with its own emotional weight. I don't think it is possible to have the same expereince reading a book for a week of three as with reading a book in a few hours. How can a fast reader encompass it all?
So my question to any fast reader willing to indulge my curiosity is,
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
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As the (likely) inspiration for this thread, I'll go first. ^_^
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
Not all that perfectly - some things stand out more than others. I definitely remember the plot, the major players, the best lines, etc.
I have a lot more trouble with books I've set aside for a while partway through, or (in rare cases) super-long books. Each time I try to read Atlas Shrugged, I've forgotten how it started by the time it's over. Even in one sitting.
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
Definitely. Part of what drives me is immersion, which comes super-easy to me. When I read something especially powerful, or if it's all enough so for it to build up, I'll have to put it down for a while and just pace, and consider it. (The Kushiel series did this to me a lot.)
Sometimes I'll latch onto a specific character... not that often, though. More often, I'll have a general connection to all of them. Really nasty fates for villains tend to have a big impact on me, too.
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
I pretty much can't - I'm so excited to get to the next part that I'm driven onward. On my first reading of a book, it's rare for me to stop until I've finished it.
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
I can't explain it - I learned when I was four, and as long as I remember, it's been as easy as a glance. If I see words, I read them instantly, without any discernible process between seeing and comprehending.
I've also had a mastery of vocabulary for nearly as long. I read the unabridged text of Journey to the Center of the Earth in a single night, way back in the first grade.
Does that make sense? (As much as can be made, anyway.) ^_^
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You were indeed the inspiration to the thread, although the questions have been bubbling inside me for a while. I know reading must be different for different people but one thing I can never quite wrap my head around is really fast reading.
So do movies feel super slow for you or what? :P
(I mean, when watching a movie you are seeing scenes and events unfold much more slowly than they would in a book. Does that feel slow? To me movies that have long stories often feel like they breeze through things).
I started a course on speed reading (that I never finished but it IS on my bucket list to finish someday). So I can answer some of your questions about speed reading since I understand why it works.
When you read you probably sound the words out in your head. This puts a limiter on how much information you can take in... think of your brain as a super fast computer. By sounding the words out in your head as you read you are forcing a middle man into your speed of comprehension that doesn't have a high bandwidth and instead has a like a crappy dial up connection speed. If you can train yourself to simply comprehend a word without any extra thought processes like direct image processing without any of the silly translations your mind wants to do then suddenly you will be not only able to read much much faster but you will retain that information much much better since it isn't cluttered with thought notes and translations. Because lets face it when you are reading slower than your rate of comprehension then your brain gets bored and starts thinking other stuff while you read. Kind of like reading a book while you watch TV... not very productive.
Now emotional events in the book? Not sure about this, but I imagine it would force a speed reader to pause no different than any other reader does in order to fully process the emotional impact of the scene. But since the speed reader will continue onward just as fast as before it probably wouldn't slow them down much.
How can you read quickly? Take the class.
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You were indeed the inspiration to the thread, although the questions have been bubbling inside me for a while. I know reading must be different for different people but one thing I can never quite wrap my head around is really fast reading.
So do movies feel super slow for you or what? :P
(I mean, when watching a movie you are seeing scenes and events unfold much more slowly than they would in a book. Does that feel slow? To me movies that have long stories often feel like they breeze through things).
To my brain, movies are happening "in real time", as it were. I'm usually sucked in pretty good, at least the first time (although some movies can seriously drag). There's a couple of old movies (Kubrick's The Shining, for example) that I'm waiting to be in the right mindset for.
When re-watching, though, I'll frequently skip over bits that I didn't like or that seem to drag. It's a lot more noticeable then. ^_^
Well, I...wait, was was this thread about?
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I know you probably didn't intend it, but it's mildly insulting that you assume our retention or enjoyment of reading is less than yours just because we're faster at it.
I find my comprehension and retention compares favorably and is often better than people I know who read slower. I also find myself becoming emotionally involved and effected just as much as my friends. I'm not sure how I read faster I just do, usually I have closed captioning of subtitles on because I often get dialog better read then spoken, similarly I absolutely detest DIY instructions or game hints or reviews done as videos as opposed to writing. Sometimes picture or video conveys information better, but I generally find them slower and worse than text.
For reference, I just reread the Honoverse books (twenty four novels, six anthologies, and one fact book) in about a month. I also played video games and watched a good bit of TV in there too.
Wha... didn't mean to be insulting. I wasn't really assuming anything, I was asking. It's like if it took you an hour to build a chair, and I turned up with a chair that looked the same and claimed to have built it in twenty seconds, you would probably prod it a couple of times before taking a seat, right?
I dunno. This fast reading stuff might as well be black sorcery to me. I'm actually pretty fast on my feet compared to most when it comes to grasping situations or concepts, but this has to cover for a pretty dreadful slowness when it comes to quickly taking in visual information. I actually read comic books even slower because I can't just take in an entire complex image at once.
As for emotional responses - I see that people consistently say they have time for them despite apparently going through books in the time it takes me to flip a page. But, say a sad scene of a funeral is two pages long. It might take me almost a couple of minutes to read it, during which I experience only the sad part. For someone who reads 30 books a month, in that time period he's already reading the next chapter, which has comic relief and an action scene. And before another three minutes have passed he's reading a description of another character in another place doing some boring chore or something.
It's an integral over time. In order for a fast reader to experience the same "amount of sadness" as a slow reader, she has to be "more sad per second". It's all very hand-wavy but that's the reason I figured why emotional responses of fast readers might be more muted.
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As for emotional responses - I see that people consistently say they have time for them despite apparently going through books in the time it takes me to flip a page. But, say a sad scene of a funeral is two pages long. It might take me almost a couple of minutes to read it, during which I experience only the sad part. For someone who reads 30 books a month, in that time period he's already reading the next chapter, which has comic relief and an action scene. And before another three minutes have passed he's reading a description of another character in another place doing some boring chore or something.
It's an integral over time. In order for a fast reader to experience the same "amount of sadness" as a slow reader, she has to be "more sad per second". It's all very hand-wavy but that's the reason I figured why emotional responses of fast readers might be more muted.
I find my emotional responses are more concentrated - I cry far more easily at books that I do at most real-life things, for example.
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You were indeed the inspiration to the thread, although the questions have been bubbling inside me for a while. I know reading must be different for different people but one thing I can never quite wrap my head around is really fast reading.
So do movies feel super slow for you or what? :P
(I mean, when watching a movie you are seeing scenes and events unfold much more slowly than they would in a book. Does that feel slow? To me movies that have long stories often feel like they breeze through things).
Movies are fine.
Listening to/watching instructional videos or speeches or things like that is painful. I almost always would rather have text, since I process it so much faster than the audio.
I suspect the difference is that there's usually more going on in the movie - all the visual input, along with the dialog or whatever keeps me from getting bored. Also, it might not be longer than it takes to read, if the book has a decent amount of descriptive test along with spoken dialog.
This.
Don't read me the instructions, give me the paper. I can read things to people off the paper in their hands, upside down, faster than they can talk. ^_^
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1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
1.) Yes. The majority of it. I don't have an eidetic memory or anything, but a good book is memorable in its own right.
2.) Of course! Why else would I read? Note that a really emotional scene, like the death of a character I really like generally makes me stop reading for a bit. I consider that a good stopping point for a time and sit and digest it for a bit, go do something else for a while, and come back. I actually usually find books more impactful to me emotionally than real-life events. I will cry over the death of a character or something far more easily than I will over the death of most people I actually KNOW.
3.) When I read slowly it's generally because of a few reasons.
-A.) There was some weird bit of awkward language that didn't quite make sense and it threw me off my rhythm while I puzzled it out. Happens in even the best of books.
-B.) I'm not super into the book.
-C.) It's a textbook or something, so I want to put more "processing power" into remembering the EXACT details long term.
The main difference between them (besides the speed, obviously) is the level of immersion. When I'm really into a book and just clipping along, I really don't see words on a page so much as I see the images those words invoke. I read Words of Radiance recently and I could not tell you a single WORD from that book, but I can remember the scenes vividly the way my mind crafted the image of them.
If I'm reading more slowly, generally this doesn't happen, since it means I'm not as immersed. If I'm super into it, I'm not sparing any "brainpower" to specifically reading more slowly. I'm concentrated on the content, not how quickly I'm taking it in.
4.) It's sort of a knack I've always had. The first time I remember it being brought up as unusual was when I was in 2nd grade. Once per week we had a "library day" where the only thing we did was get a book from the library, bring it back to class, and read it. The very first week of school I grabbed a book from the 2nd grade section of the library, brought it back to class, and read it in about two minutes. So the teacher sent me back, and back, and back, and around the fifth time told me "Maybe just pick something from one of the higher grade levels. One with chapters." and those would usually keep me for the whole class period.
I remember two series that stood out, some books about a dog detective (and he was like an actual dog, on a ranch, not an anthropomorphised talking dog), and another series that was really good but the only description I can think of (boy goes to wizard college, learns magic. End of the first book he starts his Journeyman phase and the rest of the books have hi traveling around a lot. Remember the second book involved a knight's tournament where the knights kept having their heads transformed into animal heads like wolves and pigs and such) is so generic I've never been able to find it again. Really good example of YA fiction.
I sat in on a speed-reading course in high school but got really bored since it didn't teach me anything new.
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I started a course on speed reading (that I never finished but it IS on my bucket list to finish someday). So I can answer some of your questions about speed reading since I understand why it works.
When you read you probably sound the words out in your head. This puts a limiter on how much information you can take in... think of your brain as a super fast computer. By sounding the words out in your head as you read you are forcing a middle man into your speed of comprehension that doesn't have a high bandwidth and instead has a like a crappy dial up connection speed. If you can train yourself to simply comprehend a word without any extra thought processes like direct image processing without any of the silly translations your mind wants to do then suddenly you will be not only able to read much much faster but you will retain that information much much better since it isn't cluttered with thought notes and translations. Because lets face it when you are reading slower than your rate of comprehension then your brain gets bored and starts thinking other stuff while you read. Kind of like reading a book while you watch TV... not very productive.
Now emotional events in the book? Not sure about this, but I imagine it would force a speed reader to pause no different than any other reader does in order to fully process the emotional impact of the scene. But since the speed reader will continue onward just as fast as before it probably wouldn't slow them down much.
How can you read quickly? Take the class.
A teacher in school tried to teach it to me once. I don't know if he was good at explaining it or not, but what he had me do was try to read literally between the lines - like, scan only the blank space between lines with my eyes, and allow myself ten seconds to go over an entire page like that.
I spent an afternoon trying to figuring it out, and I might have gotten some actual ability to read something like that by the end of it, though I suspect it was mostly wishful thinking at that point.
It wasn't fun, though. Didn't feel like reading. Sort of gave up on the concept after that.
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The main difference between them (besides the speed, obviously) is the level of immersion. When I'm really into a book and just clipping along, I really don't see words on a page so much as I see the images those words invoke. I read Words of Radiance recently and I could not tell you a single WORD from that book, but I can remember the scenes vividly the way my mind crafted the image of them.
If I'm reading more slowly, generally this doesn't happen, since it means I'm not as immersed. If I'm super into it, I'm not sparing any "brainpower" to specifically reading more slowly. I'm concentrated on the content, not how quickly I'm taking it in.
4.) It's sort of a knack I've always had. The first time I remember it being brought up as unusual was when I was in 2nd grade. Once per week we had a "library day" where the only thing we did was get a book from the library, bring it back to class, and read it. The very first week of school I grabbed a book from the 2nd grade section of the library, brought it back to class, and read it in about two minutes. So the teacher sent me back, and back, and back, and around the fifth time told me "Maybe just pick something from one of the higher grade levels. One with chapters." and those would usually keep me for the whole class period.
3) Hmm, interesting. I never considered the idea that slow reading could be less immersive. I can see what you mean, though.
4) Hah, I have a somewhat similar story. After I discovered that I enjoy reading, which was in second grade) I went to the school library, where I was promptly led to the kiddie section. Having already read Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, I recall being deeply insulted that I was expected to read books with pictures on them. I had a long fight with the librarian that nearly devolved into a shouting match (was a stubborn kid) until she gave up and showed me the way to the sixth grader section. It had like 50 books in a series called something like Animoprhs, about teenagers who fight mind controlling slug aliens by turning into animals. Or some such. Anyway, I became a constant visitor to the library, since I read about 2 of these per month (achieved mostly by defying my parents and reading long after lightouts). At least after the first time I didn't have to fight for the right to choose my own books.
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Man, I WISH my school library had had Animorphs.
I had to go to the local library for them.
Which, to be fair, was like 20 feet out my back door when I was in 5th grade.
I actually picked up most of the series at a flea market a few years back (missing book 2, and the last 4 or so). It still REALLY holds up. Gets pretty dark by the end.
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Listening to/watching instructional videos or speeches or things like that is painful. I almost always would rather have text, since I process it so much faster than the audio.
This a thousand times over. It pains me when I go to check the news on the internet and can only find maybe 10% of the news stories in text, the rest seeming all to be in video now. In the time it takes me to watch one 5 min clip I could be through 2-3 articles of text. Or to actually have to look up info on a video game these days. It's all lets plays and youtube tutorials. I miss text.
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I missed the end... no more Scholastic book orders. :(
You should definitely track down the last few. It is...interesting for a children's book.
By the end of the series it has shifted from a kid's adventure series to what is basically an exploration of exactly what kind of horrific trauma being on the front lines of a war like this causes people that young.
Of course that's old hat NOW (Animorphs did it first, Madoka Magica!) but it's still good.
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
Yes. About 50 or 100 books later the details may start to fuzz - depends a lot on the book and how similar it is to others (ie David Eddings' books I may get a bit blurry about what happened in which books at this point since they were hundreds of books back and the Mallorean and the Belgariad were very very similar, but 8 Million Gods was only 10-12 books back so I remember it pretty clearly. Some books stick with me longer than others, though not in a predictable pattern.)
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book?
Of course. I've woken my girlfriend up a few times (especially when reading the Dresden books) laughing. I've stopped reading books because the main character(s) annoyed me.
do you feel a connection to characters?
Very much so (well, depending on the character & the series).
While I'd never want the problems Harry Dresden has, I'd love to spend a week as the Stainless Steel Rat :)3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
Not really
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
um... practice? I've never taken a speed reading course or anything, but have read thousands of novels at this point in my life, plus who knows how many words via gaming books / internet / email / etc.
No point in jealousy. I'm a bit jealous you probably don't have to spend the $ I do to stay entertained. For awhile I was averaging about 20 books a month at Barnes & Noble. That got a bit expensive. Fortunately, now I have PFS to keep my reading habits closer to "in budget" (well that and I pretty much only buy two authors in hardback and all others only in mass market paperback, no trade paper, epub, etc. so my own stubbornness has also saved $) :)
-TimD
I am not a trained "speed reader" or anything but I read much faster than the majority of people I know.
1) Yes and more than a few days, especially for books I have read more than once. You mentioned Dresden, which I have read numerous times. I would bet I could go tell you what happens, in detail, in each Dresden book and reproduce most of the good dialogue.
2) Yes again. I have very strong emotional reactions to books. Have you ever read the Farseer Trilogy by Melanie Rawn? I get upset/angry/sad just thinking about how mean she was to the main character.
3) Not really. The only time I ever read slower is when I am proofreading my own writing, especially dialogue. I don't think that really has anything to do with your question though.
4) I have always had high reading comprehension and a large vocabulary. Besides those things I feel like a big part of why I am a fast reader is my imagination. I don't know about other peoples experiences but I think that there is very little delay between seeing the words on the page and my mind creating an image of the scene and how the characters look and sound.
I don't think you should be jealous though. As far as I am concerned, any reading is good reading.
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
Not perfectly—I probably wouldn't be able to recall all the scenes in order, but I would remember ones you asked me about.
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
Yes and yes. However, I tend to get a very limited mind's eye view of things, since description doesn't stick with me as well. I may even not remember what a character looks like. I'm getting better at the latter, though.
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
I find it sort of torturous. It feels like studying.
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
I really want to know what happens next, so I rush. This tends to come at the expense of finer understandings, though—I think I sometimes skim the longer paragraphs when they don't look interesting.
I know you probably didn't intend it, but it's mildly insulting that you assume our retention or enjoyment of reading is less than yours just because we're faster at it.
No, it's not. Speak for yourself. Really, do. You sure don't speak for me, and it's mildly insulting that you assume all "speed readers" read the same way you do. :P
...was that an insult?
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SAY THAT TO MY FACE, FACELESS MAN
*cough*Gundam*coughs*Macross*coughs*Eva*cough*I missed the end... no more Scholastic book orders. :(You should definitely track down the last few. It is...interesting for a children's book.
By the end of the series it has shifted from a kid's adventure series to what is basically an exploration of exactly what kind of horrific trauma being on the front lines of a war like this causes people that young.
Of course that's old hat NOW (Animorphs did it first, Madoka Magica!) but it's still good.
None of those are what I'd classify as "children's shows" to begin with, though.
Arguably, Harry Potter did it, too. Though I'm not tracking "who did it first" on that.
Oh, and Paranatural is kinda doing it. Again, not tracking that for competitive purposes—neither are TV shows, anyway—but it's neat to see how different authors tackle it.
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<I can't explain it - I learned when I was four, and as long as I remember, it's been as easy as a glance. If I see words, I read them instantly, without any discernible process between seeing and comprehending.
From a neurocognitive perspective, this is probably key. Psycholinguists distinguish between "native" and "non-native" languages because they're learned and processed differently in the brain; in layman's terms, you "think" in your native language, and even if you get incredibly skilled in a language you learned later in life, you'll never be truly fluent in it, because you learned to think in your primary language and will always have that translation issue.
The cutoff appears to be age-based. If you grow up in a bilingual household, you'll actually learn to speak (and think) in two languages at once, but after the age of about five, you lose the ability to learn "native" languages.
I think there's a similar difference between native readers and native speakers. If you learn to read young enough, your brain literally accepts visual symbols as a form of language. Otherwise, you need to translate the symbols to the words of the spoken language that you learned.
I'm another native-reader; my partner is not, and the difference in our reading speeds is considerable.
I'm not sure how I read faster I just do, usually I have closed captioning of subtitles on because I often get dialog better read then spoken, similarly I absolutely detest DIY instructions or game hints or reviews done as videos as opposed to writing.
This is another trait that I generally associate with native-readers, and, yes, I generally watch films with closed-captioning on because I can follow the dialogue better.
I will not buy this tobacconist, it is scratched.
Fnord.
I saw the fnord! But I get the feeling that somewhere George Dorn is still screaming.
So my question to any fast reader willing to indulge my curiosity is,
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
1) Yes...even up to years after if it is a good book.
2) Yes very strongly. One of the reason I re read books is because it is like revisiting old friends.
3) Yes if I am just not getting into the book or connecting with the characters. Or it is reading forced upon me. So when I am find myself slogging through a book it usually means I am not enjoying it
4) I just do...I don't know how....my question is...
How do you read so slowly? ;)
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<I can't explain it - I learned when I was four, and as long as I remember, it's been as easy as a glance. If I see words, I read them instantly, without any discernible process between seeing and comprehending.From a neurocognitive perspective, this is probably key. Psycholinguists distinguish between "native" and "non-native" languages because they're learned and processed differently in the brain; in layman's terms, you "think" in your native language, and even if you get incredibly skilled in a language you learned later in life, you'll never be truly fluent in it, because you learned to think in your primary language and will always have that translation issue.
The cutoff appears to be age-based. If you grow up in a bilingual household, you'll actually learn to speak (and think) in two languages at once, but after the age of about five, you lose the ability to learn "native" languages.
I think there's a similar difference between native readers and native speakers. If you learn to read young enough, your brain literally accepts visual symbols as a form of language. Otherwise, you need to translate the symbols to the words of the spoken language that you learned.
That said, speaking only for me personally, I learned to speak when I was four. So I didn't start reading that early. :P
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1) Yes and more than a few days, especially for books I have read more than once. You mentioned Dresden, which I have read numerous times. I would bet I could go tell you what happens, in detail, in each Dresden book and reproduce most of the good dialogue.2) Yes again. I have very strong emotional reactions to books. Have you ever read the Farseer Trilogy by Melanie Rawn? I get upset/angry/sad just thinking about how mean she was to the main character.
1) Oh yeah? Tell me then, in which book and in what scene in that book was Harry being a wiseass?
2) I think you mean by Robin Hobb. That trilogy was really tough on the heart. One of my friends who is also a speed reader actually stopped reading the trilogy at the start of book 3, when the bleakness became too much for her.
Man, I WISH my school library had had Animorphs.
The school library was NOTHING. The actual community library where I lived (a mostly rural area, such that my "town" had about 200-400 people at the time) was run by a real fantasy geek. She had hundreds of genre books, including really most of the "essentials" for a young reader. Dragonlance and the Deathgate cycle, Reymond E. Feist, Salvatora, Shanaara, David Eddings, Robin Hobb, you name it she's got it. I almost never had to buy any book until I was 13 years old.
The cutoff appears to be age-based. If you grow up in a bilingual household, you'll actually learn to speak (and think) in two languages at once, but after the age of about five, you lose the ability to learn "native" languages.
Incredibly, this has not occured to me, but now you point it out it's obvious that part of my slowness is reading in a language I am not a native of. I didn't think about it because I read almost exclusively in English, but this does of course slow me down.
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1) Oh yeah? Tell me then, in which book and in what scene in that book was Harry being a wiseass?
1) Yes and more than a few days, especially for books I have read more than once. You mentioned Dresden, which I have read numerous times. I would bet I could go tell you what happens, in detail, in each Dresden book and reproduce most of the good dialogue.
There's only one? Isn't that a trick question?
But then I've only read one Dresden book.I'm also amused by your description of the library and it's "essentials". All of those were either new or not out yet when I was 13. Very hard for me to think of them as "essentials". I think the first Shannara book was out, but none of the others.
Those books were pretty old by the time I started reading them, when I was 8 or 9 years old... to me they are the classics of a certain generation in fantasy. A lot of them really only work for kid or teens, looking back.
The Dresden of the first book is actually dead serious compared to the way he becomes in later books. He becomes near binary by the time you get to book 6 (maybe he develops further later) - he's either cracking one liners or moping melodramatically. The ratio is like 80/20 in favor of wiseassing. I love it, others find it annoying.
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I'm not a speed reader; I'm a stoned reader. And, yes, I often forget things quickly.
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So my question to any fast reader willing to indulge my curiosity is,
1) A few days after you finish a book, do you actually still remember in detail everything that happened?
If the book holds my interest, yes. Some books I can recite entire sections from. Others I kind of regret, but since I read so fast, I'm usually done with a book by the time I've decided that it sucked. (Only once did I read a book so annoying that I threw it out after reading it. I'm generally a book-hoarder...)
2) Do you have strong emotional reactions to individual scenes in a book? do you feel a connection to characters?
Emotional reactions, yeah. There are sections of favorite books, like Raymond Feist's Magician or Zelazny's Lord of Light or Saberhagen's Empire of the East, that I get excited a few pages before a big scene, or even a little teary-eyed, for particularly powerful moments.
I almost never feel any sort of connection to a character, since they are generally pretty different from me. (About the only thing I 'feel' with a character, annoyingly, is when someone is embarrassed or humiliated, I get all squirmy and uncomfortable. I can read about grief or rage or sex or torture, but humiliation or extended 'this is why you suck' scenes makes me cringe. Weird.)
3) Do you ever read slowly? If you do, what are the differences in experience?
Not really. I'm so used to this speed I sometimes catch myself turning a page before I'm actually done, because I looked away or stopped to talk to someone, and then I have to go back. :)
When I do take multiple days to read something, I sometimes find I have to go back and get back into the thread of it. (Not reread the entire book or anything, just sort of 'get back in the mood,' since my brain might have moved on to some other genre or medium, by watching TV or reading a game book or something, and suddenly my sci-fi novel about aliens feels weird.)
4) How the hack can you read so quickly? I'm jealous >_<
I started young. (Mom read for entertainment, we had little or no TV, I was familiar with the basics of reading before pre-school.)
It just seems to accrue with experience. I can (and often do) read a novel a day. Currently blazing through the Repairman Jack books by F. Paul Wilson, and I have to force myself to not read two books in the same day (since it takes me about an hour to read 100 pages). If I do read two books in one day, they turn into a hopeless jumble in my brain, and I sometimes feel the need to go back and re-read them to sort it all out in my head! (During college, Star Trek novels were a thing, and a roommate and I would laze away the week off of Christmas by devouring three or four of these thin books a day, tossing them to each other when we were done. And yeah, those mostly melted into some sort of freakish collage in my head...)
The more I read, the more I recognize familiar sentence patterns, particularly from familiar authors. Read X amount of Stephen King, and you can kind of figure out where he's going within a couple of words, and entire paragraphs kind of become filler, because you've read those particular word-strings before, even if the characters have different names and it's a tentacle-alien and not an evil clown, this time. (King's kind of a low-hanging fruit, for this example, since he's written the same damn story a half-dozen times, about four guys who used to be inseparable friends as teens, reconnecting as adults when weird stuff happens, and it's all terribly formulaic at this point.)
Even with authors who aren't trying over and over again to tell a particular story, there's familiar beats, and beats shared across writers and genres, just strings of words that always seem to end up together, and my brain recognizes before I say them out loud in my head, so I can kind of blaze past them passively, rather than actively reading each word.
The downside to this is that a lot of stuff seems extremely repetitive to me. I watch shows and am always genuinely thrilled when some genre convention (let's keep a secret! let's have a character overhear half a conversation and jump to a funny/disastrous mis-conclusion!) is completely averted.
All that said, I have no idea how speed reading works. It boggles my mind. Since I read for enjoyment, I'm not sure I'd enjoy speed reading. It feels a little too mechanical, even if I'm halfway there just by spending all my XP on 'read moar faster' since the XP I was spending on 'develop psychic powerz' seems to have been a bust.
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Yeah, I was thinking Shannara, Tolkein, Darkover, and Lieber...
Great, I feel old now Snow. Thanks.
I'll have to think about what I thought "essential" back at that age. It's hard to remember what I'd read in my pre/early teens and what came in the high school years.
Lots of random individual sf and fantasy.
Tolkien, first and foremost. The Hobbit's more for kids, but the LotRs pretty early. ** spoiler omitted **Darkover. Moorcock. Pern. Zelazny.
I read Covenant a little later. Not really for kids. :)
My story of reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy is nearly identical to yours - I heard some fourth graders talking about it in hushed tones and knew I had to read it because it was the real grown up kind of fantasy, not like Harry Potter, which they seemed to sneer at (secretly, Chamber of Secrets terrified me to my core). I read the books without understanding most of what was going on and made sure not to tell my parents about the ring wraiths so that they wouldn't worry about me reading scary stuff.
It appears some things can stay the same even across generations :)
Darkover. Moorcock. Pern. Zelazny.
I read Covenant a little later. Not really for kids. :)
+1, especially the Unbeliever not being for kids...
-TimD
It's kind of great, since I'm closer to Snow's age (or exactly the same age?), I got to enjoy ALL of the series' mentioned by both him and thejeff.
And Xanth. I own the original "trilogy" (the first 27). Though looking back I wouldn't recommend you read past about the first 10 or so.
I miss good secondhand bookstores. I'll gladly pay you a dollar for that beat-up old book, read it, and put it on my shelf.
I like new books too, but they're like $8.99 for the paperback.