On Reading Slowly

The book does not get longer when you read it slowly. Your relationship to it does.

I used to count books. Forty-two a year. Sixty-one. I would post the list in December and feel, for an evening, that I had accomplished something. Then I would forget what most of them said.

A shift

A few years ago I cut the number in half. Then in half again. I now finish maybe twelve books a year, and I remember almost all of them.

Slowness is not the opposite of ambition. It is a different ambition. It says: I would rather know one book the way I know a friend than glance at fifty the way I glance at strangers on the street.

What slow reading looks like

It is mostly mundane. You underline. You stop and stare out the window. You re-read paragraphs not because you missed them but because you want to feel the sentence land again. You write in the margins. You argue. You agree.

You let the book interrupt your day, instead of fitting it around the day's edges.

A small experiment

If you have a book on your shelf that you have meant to read for years, try this: read it twenty minutes a day, with no other goal. Do not track pages. Do not race the end. Just be with it.

You will be surprised what a book can become when you let it take its time.