/lit/ - Literature

>>7025246
Dumb pertains to speech and intelligence, not reading ability, so you're good.

>>7025250
It is very frustrating to be a slow reader, though, and often makes me feel as if I'm stupid. I go through books slowly and sometimes don't feel compelled to read them.

I guess reading more books will just solve the issue.

>>7025246

i read slowly, so the evidence points towards yes

>>7025266
Perhaps you're reading is fine and you're just impatient.

I read slowly, but I'm not dumb. I'm just lazy.

>>7025246
I don't know. I normally read between 500 and 700 words per minute, which is also how fast I normally think.

>>7025550
le smart but le lazy xDD

>>7025246
No. More reading can improve your speed though. Don't sweat it my man.

If you are reading books with a lot of characters chatting, maybe reading slower helps you picture it on your mind.

You can read it faster if you "draw a map" of what happens.

The fact that you're taking time out of your day to read a book makes you 10x wiser than most of the people around you.

Slow reading is still reading; reading is a skill that through practice you will become better at.

What is your frustration? With speed of scanning the page, or do you have issues with comprehending a page and you have to read over the same page/paragraph multiple times?

>>7025555
>shitposting to make a point
Don't do this.

is ~50 pages an hour slow?

I read incredibly slowly because I want to make sure I've absorbed every last bit of information in a sentence.
I wish I could give less of a fuck, I'm too analytical.

>>7025815
That's pretty slow yes.

The average adult can swallow a hundred-hundred fifty pages in sixty minutes.

>>7025552
What the fuck? You think at 700 words? How does that even work?

>>7025918
Jesus Christ I get 40 pages an hour.
Time to die :^)

How fast do you think the thought process was before the invention of language?
Did people think faster or slower?

>>7025918
Bullshit i might read 80per hour and most of my peers read way slower

>>7025266
>tfw reading. look up at clock. It's been an hour
>tfw I've only read 20 pages
I feel you anon

>>7025918
depends on the book more than anything tbh

>>7025918
I know that's a bait, but lets keep going on with your delightful meme my friend:
average adults should read about the whole bible on 45 mins, any less means you should go back to elementary school.

as for OP: what matters isn't the speed at which you can read, but whether or not you can understand what you read. I think you should always read at the speed you feel you understand the most, and keep going at this pace until you feel comfortable to go faster.

Learn to relax into your existence
Become invested in knowledge
Rather than whatever variables
Comparison is a waste of energy
Dualism will only serve you to a certain point

>>7025980
Please tell me what to do with my life

>>7025980
Are you jesting at the futility of my ever determining what you need to determine for yourself or do you really want advice?

>>7025946
That's completely normal if you are reading something like Blood Meridian, Lolita, a short story like "Mister Squishy" by David Foster Wallace, anything by Pynchon or philosphy. The average speed in which a normal person can parse dense prose is 200-250 wpm, fluctuating lower and higher than that average depending on the text. This however sucks if you're in college and need to polish off a text 400 plus pages in a week. Hence why people skim for data etc.

>>7025986
Are you jesting at the futility of my ever determining what you need to determine for yourself or do you really want advice?

>>7025246
the guy in this picture is the closest ive ever seen another person to looking like me

>>7025693
Not op but I sometimes find myself reading the same paragraph/page multiple times to attempt to understand it.
I get what the words are saying but sometimes I don't retain them and it's as if the words are only bein seen and not read.
If I do happen to fully comprehend the paragraph then I find myself too distracted trying to figure out its underlying meaning, for exsmple, "ok I understand there was an earthquake and it lifted up a bunch of dust. But what exactly does that mean to the story."

>>7026075
He's a children's poet, his name is Micheal Rosen.

>>7025905
Same for me

>>7026006
is Blood Meridian considered "Dense" prose?

>>7025919
Well, considering the fact I think in words (I assume this is how everyone thinks), it means that, if you were to time the amount of words you think in a minute, you could, I guess, come up with a "speed" at which you think. I say that I think 500-700 words per minute because I read by actually repeating the text in my head at the same "speed" as I think. I don't really understand how to explain it in a different way.

>>7026019
Not them but I do want an answer to their question

>>7026138
It's not dense, but if you don't take your time reading it, you're not going to get much out of it or appreciate the effort McCarthy put into writing it. I highly doubt authors like McCarthy, Nabokov, DeLillo, Wallace, Pynchon, Gass, Joyce etc intended their readers to speed through their work, which they spent years, sometimes decades on at 400-700wpm.

>>7025918
>>7025918
whatever

go read The Crying of Lot 49 in under an hour. do it, i'll time you.

>>7025246
>Does reading at a slow pace mean I'm dumb, /lit/?

No, it just means that you read at a slow pace.

Honestly, your definition of "slow" is probably equal to the reading pace of most people.

I can read, pretty fast, but I miss some of the subtleties when I do (which is good when I just need to get a general idea behind a body of text). If I'm reading something thought provoking or complex or if I'm just reading for enjoyment, I tend to read at a fairly slow pace (I like the way that language sounds, so I tend to read at the rate at which I speak).

The important thing to remember is this: You're in the minority. Most people will never pick up a book when they're not required to do so and most people won't read a book, in its entirety, after high school. Simply by choosing to read, you're growing smarter and wiser.

>>7027014
This tbqqqh.

>>7026153
In that case, I think at 150 words, since I am an extremely slow reader. I guess I must be retarded?

>>7026107
are you me?

>>7026006
This, I read the invisible man in a good 2-3 hours. Read categories by aristotle in the same time. substance just takes more time

You're either uninterested in what you're reading or a reader with little practice.

Find some subject matter that intrigues you. Read every day until you read faster than a niggerfaggot. Good luck anon.

>>7027048
I dunno. It's unlikely that that makes you stupid; you're just slow. Avoid timed tests or things that require fast thinking.

It isn't a race. Reading slowly won't make you sleepy that fast. Try to acknowledge what books are for you to read fast and which aren't.

>>7025246

It marginally increases the prior probability but isn't at all determinative or even strongly indicative. Probably less predictive power than height, frankly.

A guy that I work with reads so slow that he is unable to watch movies with captions. So at least you're not him tbh fam.

>>7026107
You would just do better with a different writing style it seems like. Some people like the heavy descriptions of scenes because it sort of paints a picture in their mind and let's them imagine it easier, while some people don't care about imagining the fine details and would rather have the story, or the feelings of the characters.

>>7028230
god I do the same thing..getting better at it though. I read faster with books than with captions though, but I think it's because I want to watch the movie, not the bottom of the damn screen, and by the time my eyes go down to the caption, read it, then look back up, the scene has changed. It was honestly better with the older movies when they didn't feel the need to switch the camera every two seconds.

>>7025246
my dad reads slower than a 10 year old so i hope not

>>7025246

If you're enjoying it, or it's making you think, it doesn't matter.

why is /lit/ so complacent with their slow pathetic reading speeds. is this board full of dyslexics

>>7025918
A hundred fifty pages of Dan Brown, maybe.
Let's see the average adult try a hundred fifty pages of Derrida.

Speedrunning is for videogames or track, not literature. Reading requires comprehension and speed is not conducive to this
>but I speed read 15,000 wpm and have an iq of 184 goml fagit
Fuck off son

>>7025918
>The average adult can swallow a hundred-hundred fifty pages in sixty minutes.
This is such bullshit mate.

Just keep practicing anon

>>7028459
Yaaa...most people take a couple days to go through a large book of 400-600 pages, and that's if they have ample time to read. Obviously, there are some speed readers out there that can read it within a couple hours and still comprehend and enjoy it, but that's not the norm. My boyfriend is one of them. He doesn't read often, but when he does he sits down and is done within 6 hours.

>>7028981
>>7028459
wtf is a page? some books have pages that have 3 times as many words as pages on other books

>>7028990
Just the average small text I would say, like the size we're reading now in these posts. There are few books that have larger or smaller print on average, least over here.

I read slow as hell but that's mostly because I reread stuff annotate and research interesting ideas presented by the text. I can spend like three or four months on one good book.

>>7025918
Even more if you use sauce

I have trouble trying to skim through pages and understanding but when I read at a regular pace I understand everything but I'm just slow. So I guess if I continue to read my speed will gradually improve?

>>7028990
Books should be measured by words not pages

>>7027048
that anon literally has no idea what they are saying

I'd like to see them read Being and Time at 700 words per minute and you don't think at the same speed you read, that is fucking absurd.

>>7028096
Read every day until you read faster than a niggerfaggot.

I tell this to all my students and they don't believe me

>>7026396
>mfw I already read it
ok time me

>>7025246
Depends on what is your comparative factor.
I also read very slowly compared to the average reader. But the average reader only reads YA, genre literature and entry level stuff.

>>7025815
Depends on what you read...

>>7028345
You're watching the wrong films if the camera always changes once every two seconds.

>>7025690
Pic related is what I am reading and what I was talking about. It's description-heavy so I guess it's normal that it takes me longer than usual to read it.

>>7025693
I often slow down so I can try to imagine everything or read paragraphs without paying attention and then re-read them; I am very anxious to not miss out anything in the book because it ruins the experience. Sometimes I can't concentrate or I don't "scan" very quickly as well.

>>7027014
I am still in High School :^)

I can read text quickly, but when I read at a high pace the image of what's going on in the book that I have "fades". Because of this I choose to read slowly, but at least I have a better understand of what's going on in the book.

>>7025246
Tfw five pages an hour tops

>>7029082
This. Post some annotations if you don't mind, anon.

>>7029817
i'll second this, i have a real difficulty getting annotations to a standard i'd like, for example i'll underline a paragraph or a sentence but my margin notes will be extremely vague

so yeah other people's annotations might help me

>>7029809
What the fuck?
30 pages an hour is the only acceptable answer to not be a dindu, (or woman), if not more.

>>7025246
No, and honestly there aren't strict reading speeds anyway since reading isn't a totally linear process, and even where it is linear it's not uniform.

>>7026153
Thinking is more abstract than "words per minute". stop being such a try hard faggot

>>7025905
Seconded. I'm so analytical it gives me headaches.

>tfw can't into analyzing the books I read

I hate being dumb as bricks

>>7025246
I've figured the it depends on the book at times. It took me months to finish a 400 page book. I wpuld start it, atop resding, then start it again. I finished the last 200 or so pages within 2-3 days.

After that I picked up Ask The Dust, a 165 page book and finished it in two days. The majority of which I read in a day.

I should probably mention that the precious book I was reading, Creating Minds, was non-fiction and had the format of an autobiography.

>>7025918
>>>/co/

>>7030078
>I wpuld start it, atop resding
Ho boy

>>7025246
I struggled for maybe three years a while back to increase my reading speed. It's not that I considered myself a slow reader necessarily. It's that I wanted to be a fast reader, to instantly give the impression of being well read.

I did end up increasing my reading speed, dramatically. This was more noticeable with light reading. I read that posthumously published Michael Crichton novel, Micro, in four hours. It was not good, but a book like that would have taken me two weeks on average before I starting increasing my reading speed. I was able to re-read both Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov in one month, when this would have been a year-long endeavor before. I am not saying the speed was impressive, but the change was big for me.

What I found is that I just did not enjoy reading quickly. The effort overshadowed the enjoyment. I purposely read slowly now because I enjoy the content more when reading slowly. I think my anxiety and fear of death was somehow the indirect culprit in making me want to read faster. It's shitty not being able to have the time to read, experience more, and become a genuinely interesting and unique person. I thought forcing myself to read faster would be some sort of fulfilling achievement, but it was the exact opposite.

If you're reading quality literature at a fast pace, you're not giving it the attention it deserves.

You could probably read pratchett or some other good genre fiction writer at hyperspeed and get 80% of the content though.

>>7030120
Lol. Typos are my bread and butter

>>7029872
I want you to know I got out of bed for you, anon. I'm not that guy but I am the guy whose request you seconded. Hopefully I can help, too. It would help to get diverse input, no? I'll post another example after this one.
>>7029872
Yeah, it's because I write the books.

>>7030556
And 2.

Good luck anon, stay focused!

I am proud of reading excruciatingly slow, personally. What the hell is the point of reading something in which the language and/or ideas in it aren't intriguing and complex enough to warrant frequent pause and contemplation? I'd say I read Ulysses at 4-6 pages an hour (at least at the more difficult sections). Fite me. I bet I got far more out of it than the vast majority of first-time readers.

>>7030617
you have the right idea, keep doing what you do

>>7026006

I read comfortably at 700-800 wpm and can push it to 1500ish if I really have to get through something quickly, but I always go back with the red pen on my reread at probably 150 wpm. I reread Ulysses at probably 20 wpm a while back. Reading fast is helpful to put you through the first read so you know what the novel is about / where to focus on reread / basic understanding of purpose, and the reread is where you make the text your own on every level.

>>7030617
>I'm a retard who pretends I'm better than everyone who isn't retarded, you're retarded if you don't believe me
okay retard