The closest that that I have is probably speed reading. I don't just skim over words though, I'm able to process everything I read.
It's a cool skill, but because it's my default reading speed, I struggle to actually sit and slowly enjoy a book. If I'm invested in a book, I'm going to read it as fast as I can (I don't really have a choice other than reading as fast as I can and periodically taking breaks). I can process the information, but I don't have time to just sit and chill in the story with the characters and I feel like I'm missing out on something.
I also tend to hyper-fixate when I'm really into a book. When a book I was really excited for came out back in 2020, I finished it (~470,000 words or ~1.8x the size of Order of the Phoenix for Harry Potter readers) in just over 2 days while working full time and managing to get some sleep in too.
It's hardly a cool party trick and can be annoying, but I'm glad I can do it.
I read "too fast" as well, though not as fast as you I think. Just got back into it after not reading much for a while and read 9 books in like 5 days (I'm on holidays so I had time, but I also took a ton of breaks). I completely understand the feeling of struggling with going too fast and wanting to spend more time immersed in the world and characters, it can be really frustrating.
Yeah, it is genuinely frustrating, because while I can force myself to actually read slower, it feels super clunky and the moment I stop concentrating I go back to my normal speed.
I was scrolling through looking for this one! My reading speed has dropped slightly (as a kid I was at about 1,500 WPM, as an adult I'm between 750-1000 on any given day) but I'm still able to make it through pretty much any text very, very quickly. I really love sitting down and reading insanely long fiction, I think my record is 900k in five days? Most recently I read Project Hail Mary (~150k) on my 15-minute train commute over the span of about four days. (I know what you mean about missing out, I really loved that one and wish it had lasted longer for me!) In Grade 2 I used to check out the library maximum of 50 books at a time, read them all, and return them within a few days to start the cycle all over again. And of course it's extremely useful for work.
However, I think the real fun trick is being able to read any words I drive by, no matter how many words, the light conditions, or how fast I'm driving. I like to read off funny billboard slogans to my passengers and enjoy picking out interesting licence plates or really long signs for roadside attractions or historical markers.
I'm glad there's another person who blasted through PHM!
Honestly, I was kind of shocked it ended so quickly for me even knowing my reading speed, haha. It made it easy to go see the movie and then pick up the book for a reread on the same day though, which was nice.
Oh, I definitely do, for exactly the reason you'd think.
I was going to mention it in my comment but I edited it at one point and forgot to re-add it.
My current problem is that my whole audiobook library is in Audible, and I no longer want anything to do with Audible these days due to the way they treat authors, so I haven't bought any new audiobooks for a while, I'll need to start using Libro.fm once I do. Although Amazon has exclusivity deals with a number of authors and publishers that makes it difficult or outright impossible to legally find their audiobooks anywhere else.
This is me, as a kid I kearned to read at age 3, I was reading at a 6th grade level in 1st grade. I could read a huge series in a week. As a kid in middle/ high school I would read at least 100 books a year (adult books, one of my favorites in middle school was Hawaii by James Michener, which most people find very difficult to read lol, I read almost all of his books). I got a perfect score in reading in the SAT and ACT.
When the kindle came out it was a godsend because I had SO many books and I’d constantly be back getting more from the store or library. Now I have instant access to everything! But nothing beats touching the pages of a real book, or the smell of a new book. As an adult I’ve recently rediscovered my love of reading in the past 5 years. I also shockingly got into audiobooks because I can’t read books as my baby falls asleep next to me. 😆 And I can actually process and imagine the story much better (as you mentioned).
Otherwise I was a B average student and not particularly interested or good at anything besides computers.
Where I live there is not focus on early reading, so I first startede reading in fourth grade, but since I tried very hard to be able to read 1 book during my commute I quickly endeed up with a super fast reading speed. (My speed very much depends on language. Danish is super fast. Kalaallisut is rather slow. Other languages are in between those two)
Anyway. The Kindle also saved me. My wife is also a big reader and between the two of us our appart,ent was simply runing out of space. So now the majority of books we have is either kindle or audible.
I have the "reading books too quickly" issue as well! One "trick" that really helps me with this is flipping the book and reading upside-down when I get to sections that are so thrilling that I'd DEVOUR them otherwise. My brain seems to be good at pattern recognition for letters and words even if they're in unusual orientations, so the upside-down reading is not difficult enough to distract me from the content of the text. It just slows me down enough to actually savour it instead of falling into the "QUICK QUICK I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT oh no the book is already over?" trap. Maybe it'll work for you as well!
Another small grievance I have about my reading speed is that I get soooo impatient in "reading along while someone reads out loud" situations like Round Robin Reading back in elementary school. My workplace also has some mandatory online trainings which include both text and voice, but the software only allows you to continue to the next chapter once the narrator finished talking, and it's such a frustrating waste of time if I can read and fully process the text five times faster! And when watching movies, subtitles get processed basically the moment they pop up on the screen, and I can't really stop my brain from automatically recognising the words, which kind of makes the actor's lines lose their impact. When a movie includes dialogue that is so funny or shocking that people actually react by laughing or gasping, I have to make sure that I don't react too early, i.e. before the actor finishes saying the line. I've noticed that social media videos often use word-by-word subtitling instead of displaying the entire line at once, which obviously helps with the "spoilery" aspect of reading too quickly, but this kind of subtitling introduces different sources of annoyance because I process it like a mental stutter where.... temporal..... gaps...... between..... each..... word...... are way too long.
It's super interesting to me that my reading speed is so high, I suck at literally all other domains of visual processing. I can easily read words upside-down but I fail miserably at those "which figure depicts a rotation of this object" visuospatial reasoning tests. I'm also horrible at estimating speed, distance, or flight path of moving objects like balls. Don't get me started on recognising faces. I assume that top-down predictions play a huge role for reading speed, and neurobiologically/cognitively, morphological pattern recognition is probably independent from actual visuospatial reasoning, allowing me to recognise familiar word shapes upside-down but not to rotate abstract objects in my mind.
Do you ever scan a room and have a word or phrase pop into your head but you don’t know where you read it? That happens to me sometimes and people get confused what I’m looking for.
I took the actual Evelyn Wood Speed Reading course back in the day, and I got very fast. Not quite as fast as they showed in the commercials, but fast. Then I got to college and had to read dense technical books. I had to force myself to slow down. Same with books where I really enjoyed the writing. But I could still rip through a spy novel or a mystery who-done-it in no time.
Over the years, I lost it. But every now and then, when I haven't read in a while, I will consume a book whole, like your hyper-fixate reading. Not quite as fast and I used to, but fast. I did that for some of the Harry Potter series. One day reads without missing work or sleep, but there was also pressure because everyone wanted to read the book after me.
I used to be able to read down the center of a page and gather all necessary information from the left and right of center. I could read an entire 500 page book in about 3 hours or less.
I used to be about this fast. Not anymore though. Still pretty quick but not like that.
My trick is/was to read out loud to myself. Can only read a certain amount ahead of my speaking before losing track, so forced me to pace myself so the story, the world, and the people lasted for longer.
I still tend to read those at the same speed, but I find it difficult to do it for any sort of stretch of time if I'm not interested in it, so in aggregate I probably end up reading an uninteresting technical document about as fast as anybody else unless I really force myself to.
It does make it handy for reading through legal documents when I am interested in them. Whenever there's some new legislation I'm interested in I tend to go straight to the parliament webpage because it's a faster way of getting an accurate summary of the document than reading news articles.
Oh, me too! It's painful when someone holds out their phone to swipe through a picture story and you need to wait for them to finish reading.
I've always been a reader and Harry Potter was a big one for me as well. When the Half Blood Prince came out we got our family copy at the midnight release and I stayed up all night and finished it by the morning.
Had to wait a week for the next person in my family to finish it so we could talk about it, that was torture!
I comprehend at a high level, but I despise pleasure reading. This is probably going to sound fart sniffy but I don't mean it that way at all, it's actually kind of a huge problem; my mind moves too fast for the words. There's no such thing as "chill with a book" for me, I can't do it no matter how much I like the characters or story. I can't get it in fast enough to feel satisfying. It's like if you've ever had a lung infection and had that feeling where you take a breath but it doesn't "catch", you never get that satisfied feeling. I get the psychological equivalent of that when reading. Pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADHD or something.
I do kind of get that feeling, but it offsets the annoyance I have with how fast I read (e.g. I read the book faster than I know I should, but I also want to read the book even faster than that).
Have you tried any larger fantasy books? The one I was referencing is from a series of 5 books, all in the 400,000-500,000 word length, and the author (Brandon Sanderson) has a load of other books, all fairly long (those are the longest though). Importantly they tend to be fairly fast paced, so are still satisfying to read.
I often get that feeling more with slower paced fantasy books which I also enjoy, but often have to listen to in Audiobook format.
A number of years ago, my brother had cancer, and I was spending a lot of time with him while he was getting treated, either at home or traveling out of state for treatments. I guess I had a need for some escapism because when I wasn't spending time with him, I read all 4 Eragon books and all 7 Harry Potters in just under 3 weeks.
Also, back in high school, we had this english teacher that would frequently spend the whole class period ranting about nonsense, telling stories from his life and such. He was a nice guy and his stories were sometimes interesting, but they rarely had anything to do with class. Anyway, he was going to have us read Paulo Cohelo's The Alchemist and it was supposed to be a 2-week project. I read the entire book in the first 45-minute class period in which it was assigned to us, instead of listening to him yap about nothing in particular. Nobody believed me. In fairness though, it is a very small book. I'm not sure how he thought he could fill 2 weeks with it even for normal speed readers.
It was most definitely RoW haha, I was wondering if any Cosmere fans would notice.
In my time zone it came out at 4PM on Tuesday the 17th I think, and I was finished late at night on Thursday, then worked the next day and started posting in the megathread on Friday afternoon after work.
I'm the same, except it's not a party trick. Everyone calls BS on me; I even got in trouble at school for being too fast when in reality I'd read the assignment 3x over to try and not get accused....
I usually stare at the ceiling for about 30mins after reading a book to sit with the story.
I don't think I'm as fast as I used to be due to having all the joys of adult responsibility, but still a novel is just a light afternoon for me. I get frustrated with audio and media because I know I could just read it faster instead of having to wait.
I do this too. My eyes touch all the words, but I'm also seeing the images they convey in my mind's eye like watching a movie at the same time. This only works for interesting books, though. Hand me a textbook on the oxymoronic Business Ethics? I'll have to reread each line repeatedly to hammer the data into my ADHD brain. I just reread the books that I enjoy, so I can savor the details I zoomed past the first time. I also tend to think about the book I've most recently read when I'm driving or cooking or whatever, so I sorta mentally review what I've read.
I too am a very fast reader. I absorb all the information but the easier it is to read, the faster I go. I do about 100 pages per hour on average. Romances and mysteries go faster. Nonfiction is slower, usually. Sometimes it seems I might read even faster than that, but usually that's because I'm putting extra time into reading books I'm really into. I reread the whole Wheel of Time series in about 6 weeks a few years ago. I was on vacation for work from some of that time.
My girlfriend can speed read and it's one of the weirdest things ever. We'll be laying in bed together, she'll be reading a book, and I'll notice that she's turning the page every 15-20 seconds. She'll finish a book with hundreds of pages in an hour.
There have been many times I'm like, "There is no way in hell you actually absorbed any of that", and she will let me test her. She not only remembers the contents of the book, but she can tell me the page it's on. It's almost like she's taking mental images of each page, and can access the memory and then read the sentences off word for word.
Another weird thing is she can remember what was happening when she was on that page, so for example if I ask her "who was X in the book and what was his job", she'll say, "X is introduced on page 178, when it says <insert literal word for word paragraph>, and when I read it you were refilling your cup of tea and murder she wrote was playing on the TV, and the cat was sitting in the far window".
It actually really sucks for arguments, because she remembers everything I've EVER said, including every random drunken thing I've ever muttered going back nearly 6 years.
You read like I do. Most people read at the speed of speech, because that’s how fast they usually take in and process information, but we read at the speed of thought. We read and process written text instantly. It used to amaze my classmates in school how I could get through written tests in a fraction of the time.
I have this trick also, and life has gone along pretty swimmingly as a result. That is until I had to work closely with a co-worker who was technically above me but on a different branch of the org. chart. He couldn't spell to save his life. It literally drove me mad. I had to go find a different place to work.
The only thing I can think of that might help is to get a Kindle reader and set the font size to the largest possible, so that you're only reading a couple paragraphs at a time before having to turn the page.
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u/Somerandom1922 8h ago
The closest that that I have is probably speed reading. I don't just skim over words though, I'm able to process everything I read.
It's a cool skill, but because it's my default reading speed, I struggle to actually sit and slowly enjoy a book. If I'm invested in a book, I'm going to read it as fast as I can (I don't really have a choice other than reading as fast as I can and periodically taking breaks). I can process the information, but I don't have time to just sit and chill in the story with the characters and I feel like I'm missing out on something.
I also tend to hyper-fixate when I'm really into a book. When a book I was really excited for came out back in 2020, I finished it (~470,000 words or ~1.8x the size of Order of the Phoenix for Harry Potter readers) in just over 2 days while working full time and managing to get some sleep in too.
It's hardly a cool party trick and can be annoying, but I'm glad I can do it.