Doing what I do for a living a lot of my reading is work related and to an extent I can speed read and skim. Review stuff has to be taken a little more slowly so I don't miss anything.
Leisure reading tends to be a bit more, well, leisurely, especially as I do it in three languages, two of which aren't my native tongue, so that slows me down!
Poetry? Poetry takes me for ever to read (but it also takes me for ever to write, so that's logical enough :o)
So I'd say that my pace of reading varies, depending upon what I'm reading at the time!
It's not about quantity, it's about quality! And some books are thicker than others. I read the Diary of Samuel Pepys last year - it took weeks. A chick lit title I can get through in 2 hours.
I have those - different speed settings - but I can't always control them. I think they're more influenced by the work being read than anything else. Most fiction, especially current SF and fantasy, makes me crawl like the proverbial lost wanderer in the Sahara - unless I skim, in which case I miss a lot (it's a lot harder to skim unfamiliar fiction than it is nonfiction) - but some books just whiz by at top speed while being terrifically enjoyable. Jonathan Coe, for instance. I just read two novels of his that were new to me, in no time at all. Why can't there be SF/F writers who write like that?
I'm pretty excited about this comment, as I was really flummoxed when you said over there, "But I bet there are ABBA readers who can tell me." I'm not even joking.
I'm not really a slow reader, but I hardly ever get to read things for fun anymore, so I know what you mean about New Year's. My friends are all, 'I read 150 books! Next year I will read 175!' and I'm all, 'well, other than things for my PhD, which were not whole books but chapters and sections and articles, I read...I think four.' And then I envision how I will be a regular reader again and read books for fun all the time and how happy I will be. And then I dick around on facebook till bedtime.
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Date: 2013-01-11 09:01 am (UTC)Leisure reading tends to be a bit more, well, leisurely, especially as I do it in three languages, two of which aren't my native tongue, so that slows me down!
Poetry? Poetry takes me for ever to read (but it also takes me for ever to write, so that's logical enough :o)
So I'd say that my pace of reading varies, depending upon what I'm reading at the time!
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