Books As we've established, I'm a very slow reader. While others seems to work through two or three books a week and hold down a full time job (probably because they read books for a living), in most circumstances it takes me ages to finish a book. After a while I find it difficult to concentrate on the words or when I can concentrate, it takes me at least a minute to read each page (or at least that's how it feels). God knows how I managed this.
Ever on the look out for new ways of trying to speed up my reading capacity, or at least make it more palatable I've tried a few things over the years. Reading on a Kindle did help for a while, but the cost of books on that platform is incredibly expensive. Audiobooks help, but not everything is available, sometimes the reader's voice is so soothing it's easy to blank on what they're actually saying and again, it's expensive even with the Audible trick.
One of my more successful attempts was to read fifty pages a day which was fine for shorter books but lemon difficult for literature or anything with even a hint of complexity. I was pretty proud of the amount of literature I read in 2013 (including the Bible) but eventually came unstuck trying to conquer The Mysteries of Udolpho and got lost amid the tiny text and obtuse phraseology. My propensity for non-fiction hasn't helped over the years either.
Here's my latest trick which I'm calling the Ten Chunk Rule. That probably needs some work. Essentially, it's to look at the page count of the main text and then separate the book into sections of 10% each (ignoring chapters and headings) and so ten chunks. My current read, Emma Dabiri's Don't Touch My Hair is about 230 pages, so each chunk is 23 pages long. Next on the pile is Susan Sontag's On Photography which is 207 so ten sections of twenty pages.
Then the rule is to only read 10% of the book in each session and stopping and having a break even if I feel like I can read more. At the moment, two sessions a day feels about right, one in the morning, one in the evening, which means I can get through a book in five days, which is a big achievement for me. My plan is to try and read fifty books this year, not a huge amount by some standards but it's nice to have a goal. We'll see.
How does this work with books which are longer than the average length? I recently bought the Dwarsligger edition of John Green's Paper Town which is 607 pages and so about 60 pages a day, but that is modern fiction and the page count seems to be dictated by the format. Perhaps if it's very long, I'll break it into 5% sections or very short, 20% sections. Either way, my long unread signed copy of Simon Garfield's The Last Journey of William Huskisson looks far less onerous now.
