How to read a book a day
As I write, I sit in a den surrounded by 15,000 books, that's about a book a day, every day, for thirty years. My reading habits developed early in high school and, by college, I have developed a voracious appetite for reading, mostly science fiction, but with a healthy mix of technical non-fiction as well.
Most people attribute my reading prowess to some quirk or trick associated with speed reading. It is not. I probably read faster than more people, but the trick to reading a book a day is not SPEED; it is ENDURANCE.
Let me explain.
Consider a typical paperback book that is about 120 pages long. If you open the book to any random page, you can probably read a single page out loud in about a minute. True, you would probably be reciting words as fast as you can, but it would still only take about a minute to read one page out loud. Therefore, if you could keep up that pace, you should be able to read the average paperback book, out loud in about 120 minutes or two hours.
So why does it take people a week to read a book?
Because they do their reading in short sprints. They might read for fifteen minutes and then they stop. They get tired, or their eyes hurt, or they get sleepy, or they get distracted, they lose interest, or get a headache... and they put the book down. The next day they may pick up the book again and read for another fifteen minutes. Of course, they may have to scan earlier pages to recall what happened or where they left off, before reading new material for the remaining ten minutes before they put the book down again.
The reason that most people take a week to read a book has more to do with the duration that they read and basic attention span than it has to do with speed. If you take a two-hour task and performed that task in fifteen or twenty-minute sections each take, of course, it will take many days.
It would be like running a marathon, not all at once, but rather running the marathon one mile per day.
At more than 26 miles, breaking the marathon down into daily, one-mile segments would take a runner almost a month. Note the average runner completes a marathon in about four and a half hours. Indeed, you can walk that distance in about seven hours.
The trick to completing a marathon in a single day, like reading a book a day has far more to do with endurance than with speed.
Consider the individual who can only run one mile without falling down and gasping for air. If he runs and builds up his strength, eventually he will be able to run two miles. With more practice, eventually, he will be able to finish a three-mile stretch non-stop, and then four. With consistent training, he will eventually be able to run the 26 miles.
During that training, he will build up strength and develop stronger muscles, and, at the same time, his speed will increase too.
Reading is the same. People can train themselves to read for longer and longer periods of time and build up their endurance. Along the way, other benefits will accrue. Your eyes will get stronger and your attention span will improve. You will be able to concentrate better and your memory and comprehension will grow too. And finally, your reading speed will increase.
So that is the secret to reading a book a day. First, you have to build up the endurance to sit in one place and focus sufficient attention that you can read for an hour or two a day. Then, in the time that you would have spent watching a single TV movie each night, you can read a book instead.
Then, you will be able to take a book, sit down and read it in a single sitting. As your reading speed increases, you can increasingly longer books, but you probably won't notice. When your reading skills advance to that point, you will find yourself "IN FLOW" and you will lose track of the passing of time at all. The hours will disappear in a blink and you will have journeyed much farther than you could have run, or driven, or flown in that time.
Reading is a passion that has endured since my youth. I have traveled to places few people have visited, met with people long since passed away, and shared the dreams of people whom I have never met. What I know is far greater than what resides in my head. I am surrounded by the minds of thousands of others who speak to me with the words they recorded in print.
If you practice and work up the strength and build the endurance, reading can become a passion for you as well.
(Note related discussions on FLOW, MEMORY, and MEMETICS, as well)
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One of my favorite quotes is that “There is little difference between a man who cannot read and one who does not.”
Another is by Mark Twain… “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
