Interesting discussion on speed reading going on over at Megan and Tyler's pads. It occurred to me that I don't actually know how fast I read, so I took this handy test, which placed me in the 550-600 words-a-minute range. This test, conversely, gave me a bit under 500, with 100% comprehension, but their incentive is to make you feel slow, and they did so by packing the text with mathematical formulas. Which illustrates something important, actually: Reading speed, for me, has a strong inverse relationship with the density of the material. I'll fly through good fiction at the rate of a couple pages a minute. More serious nonfiction will take me a minute a page. Which doesn't sound like much, but ends up feeling really slow after, oh, twenty minutes.
Indeed, my real problem with nonfiction isn't the speed I read at -- there's nothing intrinsically wrong with spending 200-some minutes on a heavy book -- it's an inability to concentrate on it for more then 30 or 40 minutes at a time, and an unwillingness to put in the requisite number of 30 or 40 minute chunks. I don't really know how you fix that, but in lieu of little Matrix-style download ports in the back of our necks ("Whoa. I know the social transformation of American medicine!"), I'm open to suggestions. Meanwhile, comments are open for you to brag about your crushingly fast test scores.
