Slow Reading

Perhaps because I am a slow reader by nature and couldn't read faster if I tried, I like the idea of deliberately slow reading.

I love technology. I would upgrade to the iPhone 4 and buy an iPad in a heartbeat if I weren't so cheap. I crave these things. But I also recognize - in my own life - that technology has changed the way I live in a negative way. I compulsively check email (not uncommon these days). When someone is talking too loud (or if I just don't want to hear them), I instinctively reach for an imaginary volume dial only to discover that I can't actually turn them down (seriously, I do this). I relish slow living... mindful living, but I am very much prevented from living this way by gadgets and connectedness. Maybe I'm fighting a losing battle with myself, but I don't anticipate ever not trying my damndest to disconnect myself from my computer.

Here's the article from Newsweek. Here are some quotes:

The phrase “slow reading” goes back at least as far as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who in 1887 described himself as a “teacher of slow reading.”

“You see schools where reading is turned into a race,” Thomas Newkirk, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire, told the Associated Press last week. “You see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute. That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.”

“One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he’d come to a word and it would almost act like a hyperlink,” Newkirk said. “It would just send his mind off to some other thing. I think they recognize they’re missing out on something.”

John Miedema, author of Slow Reading, likens the movement to the Slow Food movement, which is as much as about taking your time as it is about consuming locally grown food. Both movements encourage increased mindfulness in the conduct of routine activity. “It’s not just about students reading as slowly as possible,” Miedema says. “Slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book.”

Recently I saw a recommendation that we give ourselves a sabbath from the computer; that is, we turn the darn thing off one day a week. I like that idea. But computers are only part of the techno problem. We’re bedeviled by machines at every turn, and every one of them whispers, “Hurry up.”