Fiction, fun and profit

A few months ago I realized I needed to read faster. I've always been an "A" student. I've shown my employers that I have the skills and wit they acquire. I needed to read faster because you can drown in the technical information available to people these days. The web is competing for the former juggernaut of time-sinks, television. What's more insidious is that the web surfer always has cause to surf further in the name of learning something edifying or useful to his job. I don't know anyone who complains that he can't find "anything good on the internet" the way people would gripe about there being nothing on TV.

With a strong and growing career in software engineering and a new hobby of aviation, I picked up the book 10 Days to Faster Reading, published by the Princeton Press. It's been a great investment, both of the paltry monetary sum and the 10 days themselves. The book mentions the physiology of reading, how our eyes make short stops when scanning across a page, how you can practice grabbing more words per eye movement and such.

What I realized was that technical science and math textbooks can train you to be a slower reader. Math books in particular are very dense, forcing the reader to savor each word, grok each sentence and appreciate each subtlety before moving on. But most of what we read isn't that dense. This extra redundancy allows readers to skip entire sections which may not apply or read passages quickly, confident that the important information will likely resurface soon. If you studied too hard in math, though, you may be carrying your habits over to non-technical works and slowing yourself down unnecessarily.

My solution? Read more novels. There are plenty of other reasons you would want to read novels as an engineer, but start with this one if you haven't picked up any pleasure reading in a while. Having an interesting plot and characters to look forward to can accelerate your engagement and your pace of reading. It just might train you out of reading each sentence like a mathematical equation.

*Note: 10 Days to Faster Reading notes that pleasure reading should just be done at your own pace. After all, it's for pleasure. While that's true, reading faster doesn't mean you miss much. I remember knocking back entire Goosebumps books in between 30 and 60 minutes as a kid, and I didn't enjoy them any less for the speed.