What I Am Trying to Teach Myself About Reading, Part II: The First Hundred Pages and Some Other Suggestions.

So you have decided to read a book. Maybe it is the “Book You Always Avoid[ed] Starting.” How do you keep it from becoming a “Book You Always Avoid Finishing?” In just the last few years the number of books I read has increased dramatically. I remember the first time--my Freshman year in college--I set out to read 50 books in a year and balked at the task. Last year I read 100. This year I am on course to surpass last year. I have been asked recently what the secret is to consistently working through book after book. So I thought I would share a few of the things that have worked for me. Maybe they will prove helpful to some other people who have struggled, as I have, with being consistent and diligent in their reading goals.

Don’t speed read. Don’t do the obvious thing and just try and buzz through a 500-page book. In the end, you won’t feel any sense of accomplishment for swallowing a book like it was a very large pill even if you were able to do it in an impressively brief duration. Quite to the contrary, I believe it is deep engagement and investment in the text that will continue to keep you interested, not merely forcing your eyes to move over the words rapidly. I am quite a slow reader. If you are, don’t see it as a handicap; it may be your greatest strength. In fact, “slow motion” reading is itself a recognized critical technique.

Start a Goodreads page. Tracking your reading will give you a sense of accomplishment. Rating works, writing reviews, and sharing with others are all good ways to make your reading about much more than what happens when you stare into a book alone. Also Goodreads has an application that allows you set reading goals and periodically check your progress. 

Read authors, not works. I probably spent 10 hours reading the first Shakespeare play I ever tackled on my own. Now I could easily read a whole play in three hours. Sometimes the hardest part of reading a new work is developing your own technique of how to read the author’s work. The next work you read by that author will not only be much, much easier, it will also allow you to begin to understand an author’s entire body of work. Soon you will think about an author in terms of a nexus of different and complementary writings. Your reading will go faster and will be much more rewarding.

Make your book the most interesting thing in the room. Leave the house. Go to the library. Take nothing but your book, and maybe a pencil for underlining and making marginal notes to yourself. When it is set in front of a computer tapped into the internet a books looks like an musty clump of old papers. However, thing about how you feel when you are sitting in a waiting room with nothing to read. Suddenly even the back of a cereal box or your DVD player’s instruction manual would be a welcome diversion. Your task before you read is to recreate that waiting room and place yourself in it with a book in your hands. 

My best recommendation: read the first 100 pages of your book all in one sitting. When we watch a television show we experience an entire narrative with a beginning, middle, and end all in a half hour, or maybe even 20 minutes if you subtract time for commercials. It is not surprising that it is hard for us to sustain interest in a story that will take 10 hours or more to completely unfurl. The good news, however, is that it is worth it. The first time you read a particularly lengthy classic all the way through you might feel more like leaping from a cliff than reading another page of florid descriptions of one. Take heart! You will be glad the book is so long the next time you pick it up to read it, when it has become a good old friend and not bar after bar of ornate prose separating you from an “A” in English 218.