Slow Reading, the Imagined Speech


Thoughts for a Friday: I stumbled upon an article online from "The Guardian", as one does. It was titled "You can't speed read literature" and the writer Evan Maloney describes the literary critic Harold Bloom as this voracious lightning fast reader who somehow still manages to retain what he has read. It felt validating for me as a slow reader (who used to read like a hare in school but became a tortoise at university!) when the writer said that for him this was far from the case. He writes: "Speed reading might be an effective tool for office documents, textbooks, and letters of unrequited love, but the prose of great literature should be savoured, should it not? Part of the joy of reading comes from "hearing" our psychic palates pronouncing the words in the mind's ear; the imagined speech, 'richly flavoured like a nut or an apple'". I believe this!

One of the books I never got around to "finishing" during my Jane Austen course because everyone was reading so fast really, and I wanted to get at the books I was reading better, was E. M. Forster's A Room With a View But I do remember savouring the language and scenes and feeling transported to Florence with Lucy and George). I think we should consider things like reading and ask ourselves why do we read? Just to tick off the books from our to be read list with a sense of accomplishment (great as that is!), or are we also savouring the view this text provides?


What are you all reading this fine day? Blessings to you all!

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