Reading Rainbow

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here or not, but I’ve recently gone back to school, back to university. I figure, I’m not going to get any younger, and I would actually like to have a degree to my name. But beyond that, it was caused mostly by digging through a course catalog with my wife and exclaiming, incredulously, “Really? There’s a class where we can sit and just talk about the Lord of the Rings, and Beowulf? How cool!” and I did that often enough with enough classes that it just seemed like a good idea.

So I did it. I went back. Instead of writing this post, I should be stretched out on the couch, reading about rhetoric and thinking about what work I’m going to bring in as an example of rhetoric, on Tuesday (my money is on V for Vendetta, but I keep wavering away).  Anyway, point is, I should be reading.

That IS my point for this post, actually. And I’m getting there by degrees.

While we were talking about interesting classes they offered, my wife pointed out that they offer a forensics class, as well as mortuary courses. And I amused myself — and probably bothered her — for several minutes, wondering if there were dead bodies on the campus, and where they kept them. “In the cafeteria, probably. Here’s the coleslaw, and here’s the frozen pizza, and here’s Joe, and here’s the potatoes…” And I felt very hip, having made fun of school food. (It’s uncalled for. The food there is fantastic. Seriously, I eat better there than I do at home…)

One of the courses she mentioned was a single-semester course on Speed-Reading. She mentioned it in passing. It stuck in my head, and I stewed on it. It’s what I tend to do.

I’m a fast reader, the way it is. I always have been. I’ve slowed down a bit, in recent years, and I am perpetually frustrated by the sheer number of books that exist (and that I own) that I haven’t read yet but really want to. And adding to this those infomercials I’ve seen as a kid, where some guy sits across from the host and palms through a magazine as fast as he can, and then tells the host what he’s read about. I liked that idea.

I expounded my thoughts on the matter on my own personal blog, and then I expounded further in a comment to myself, which probably just indicates that I don’t have enough to do with my time. I won’t repeat my thoughts here. Here’s a link, if you’re interested.

What particularly caught my interest was, on a page during my speed-reading research, someone said something offhand for a second, and it made me think further. What I thought was this: If we are interested in running, we work to continually improve our stamina, our stride, we buy better shoes and we eat healthy and we improve. And if we are unhappy with our ability to type, then we take typing courses, and we buy keyboards that suit us better, and we generally work hard to improve our typing. As writers, we work to improve our skill, style, and all our tools. We strive to constantly improve our writing. So why is it that we don’t think, or attend to, our reading ability? Most of us stop gaining in reading speed when we are about twelve. The most we do is buy glasses as our eyes go bad. Why don’t we fight to improve our reading speed and ability?

Reading is as vital a part of being an author as writing is. You don’t have to be reading fiction, you don’t have to be reading the genre you might be working in…but you should be reading. It always baffles me when I meet people who write stories…but don’t like to read. Or don’t want to read. Or just don’t read. Mostly, what I find is that they aren’t interested in prose; they are using it as a way to make movies, or TV shows, without actually becoming filmmakers.

So…reading. I’ve started working hard on my reading skills. I’ve found a few exercises, which I’ll dig up again and provide links to, in a comment on this post. Things that work the eye  muscles. I’ve found some very simple techniques, and they’ve helped immeasurably (I run the capped tip of a pen along the line of text at a speed faster than I would otherwise read, and then I read at the speed of the pen moving. It feels like I’m just scanning. And yet, going back…the information is there, absorbed, as surely as it would have been otherwise.)

I’ve worked hard. It means I’m reading much faster than I was (it also means I gave myself a whopping headache the first day I tried). I’m continuing to work, to train, to get myself fit, to read faster and faster and retain whatever I can. I was thrilled to find it working, in the first place, and even more thrilled to find that it worked for fiction, too. There are still some works of fiction that I luxuriate inside of, and purposely won’t read at great speeds. But there are other works I would like to read, that a sort of accelerated-reading will enable me to.

I’ve got some Big Plans About Reading, all swirling around in my head. But I’m not going to mention them quite yet. I will, in the fullness of time. But not yet. And that, I’m afraid, is why this article feels like it stops without reaching a conclusion. Er. Sorry about that.