Speed-reading fiction

As I reflected on my first month of speed reading, I wrote that I thought that speed-reading perhaps wasn’t suitable for fiction. I had tried speed-reading a quite poetic and unpredictable book, with limited success. This weekend I picked up Erlend Loe’s Naïve Super (the Swedish translation) that my girlfriend gave me as I turned thirty.

I had just read a book by Tony Buzan that Mattias borrowed to me, Use Your Head (out of print, I think), in which he briefly explains mind-mapping, speed-reading, study techniques, etc. Anyway, he suggested that you when you are studying and are about to read a book, decide how much time you are going to spend on it. As I was about to start reading Naïve Super (which I liked a lot, by the way), I thought that I should read it in two days. It wasn’t anything I committed myself to, though.

And it took two days; I read half of it on Saturday, and the other half on Sunday. Well, it didn’t take two full days – it felt more like two hours, and the rest of the time I spent with my daughter. My fear regarding speed-reading fiction was that I wouldn’t pick up the feelings that the words convey, that I would merely register the key words and therefore read only a skeleton of the book. But that didn’t happen. It was like when I usually read fiction, but without my pace getting slower and slower and with the last chapters being a struggle.

It may be that Naïve Super is more easily read than other books. It may also be that the speed is lower than for speed-reading in general. I’m not that interested in measuring my words per minute, neither for fiction nor for non-fiction. As long as the pace feels good, I’m happy. As for non-fiction, I feel that I currently read at a pace that is near the pace of my understanding.

Update: Niklas writes (in Swedish) that Use Your Head isn’t out of print. Amazon.co.uk has it for immediate delivery. Thanks!