The Sadness of Speed Reading

Buck | dog | away | abandoned | Curly | She-wolf | Attacked...

Listen to my audio version here ↑

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The first night of my new speedreading class, I sat in a crowded, stuffy room, wearing a wool turtleneck sweater amidst mostly teenagers preparing to take the SATs or ACTs. A few were old enough to be studying for the GREs or MCATs. It all had a very cram-for-the-test vibe.

I must have seen a flyer for the class at the co-op or somewhere—it definitely wasn’t offered through the university.

The stakes were high. I risked failing my comprehensive exams and out of the PhD program. We were expected to read fifteen hundred pages a week, much of it literary theory (of the impenetrable Kant variety, not just the delightful Barthes) and the rest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, i.e., really, really long novels.

My eyes were basically broken. I was reading so much that I’d developed asthenopia, which people who’ve never suffered from it blithely referred to as “eye strain” but is so much worse. My eye muscles were locking up and spasming, causing blurred vision, trouble focusing, headaches, and eye pain.

The cause: I subvocalize when I read, and that was slowing me down and making me ill under my doctoral program’s demands.

Subvocalization is the sensation that we’re hearing words in our minds as we read. Studies show that the larynx is actually imperceptibly activated, contracting as if we’re speaking the words, though we aren’t. Subvocalization is a good thing. It leads to greater comprehension, less cognitive load, and the sense that there’s a presence behind the words. It creates a more intimate reading experience, giving us the sense that the writer is talking to us. The writer/narrator-reader relationship makes us buy every book an author writes.

But subvocalization also causes us to read more slowly and will make Samuel Richardson’s 950,000-word, eighteenth-century novel Clarissa feel like about two million words.

I’m blessed with a condition called “rapid visual processing” (often mistaken for having a photographic memory, which isn’t really a thing), and I can take in large amounts of textual information all at once—on a screen or page.

But my mother taught me to read and encouraged me to subvocalize, and I couldn’t turn it off.

With comps looming, I had to do something to speed up.

Speedreading is fast. It’s efficient. It’s optimized. Unlike scanning and skimming, which don’t pretend to be anything other than a cursory glance at what’s written, speed reading boasts about being better than reading.

The first text assigned was an excerpt of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. It was one of those books I should have read—I was a writer and had infiltrated a doctoral program in American literature, after all—but hadn’t.

The course instructor, a man whose face I can’t remember, and about whom I can only recall that he was dressed appropriately in black, had given us the fundamentals: The goal was to “chunk” words, dismantling the flow of sentences, disrupting the rhythm of language, and, most importantly, silencing the author’s voice.

He started a timer and told us to begin. I used the notecard I’d been given to go line-by-line, lumping letters and words and beaming them to my brain to be processed, not absorbed.

Buck, dog | away | abandoned | Curly, she-wolf | attacked by another wolf | the other wolves gathered around | Spitz, the pack’s owner breaks up the fight | Curly’s dead | Spitz laughs | Lesson: nothing is fair in the pack | Buck hates Spitz

The buzzer went off, startling me. I answered all the reading comprehension questions correctly. There was meaning in what I read, but it didn’t mean anything.

I hadn’t gasped when Curly was attacked. The fact that she was trying to mate with her attacker wasn’t even in my consciousness. I hadn’t felt a little sick at the description of the “metallic clip of teeth” when the wolf attacks and Curly’s face is “ripped open from eye to jaw” or learned that wolves fight by striking and leaping away, striking and leaping away. I wasn’t disgusted when the wolves crowd around to watch the fight, “licking their chops,” and then close in on her, “snarling and yelping.” My stomach didn’t clench when she was left “screaming with agony, beneath the bristling mass of bodies.”

First edition of Jack London's Call of the Wild, 1903.

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Most importantly, I felt no allegiance to Buck, the dog, our protagonist, or awe for the novella for having a dog as the protagonist. (London was/is a problematic figure given his penchant for eugenics; we’ll love the art, not the artist here.)

I felt nothing.

But being a doctoral student was my sole income source and (I thought) my future. My mother was so proud that, like her, I would have a PhD. She always said, No one can take those three letters away from you, which, it turns out, is true.

I had to decide: Turn off the voice and let my soul wither a bit or risk being asked to leave the program?

This was long before using AI as a “second brain” was a thing. Now, there’s no reason to read anymore. You can plug it all into ChatGPT and have ChatGPT summarize it for you. If you don’t want to read its inane, soulless summary, you can press play, and the audio function will read it to you.

The goal, of course, is to get faster and be more productive. To hurry up and get it done.

There was a time when I loved Claude and thought that AI could do interesting things in terms of writing and thinking. Now I see it for what it is: another way of clumping, chunking, lumping, processing.

I love digital tools and AI as an elevated search engine: Wispr Flow, which has transformed my relationship to email; anything with an Apple on it, pretty much; Gemini to find non-toxic plants so my cats don’t die if I fill the planters on my balcony.

But when it comes to actually thinking and reading and writing, I’m convinced it slows us down becuase it leaves us empty, which defeats the purpose of thinking and reading and writing.

After dropping out of the speed reading course, I didn’t sleep for about a month to prepare for my comprehensive exams.

I passed comps, though not in a way that made me the star of the program. I didn’t shut off the writer’s voice, clump words, or process when I read and was less efficient for it. It would be nice to say to you that it was worth it, not being the star and, well, not getting a job in academia, and in many ways it was because I wouldn’t be here now on the couch with my cats writing this to you.

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