Do you have any advice on reading faster ?

[Soulbass]

A quick test shows your reading speed, or "WPM" (words per minute) :

http://www.readingsoft.com/

English is not my native tongue so it ends up between 125 and 150, this is without taking time to contemplate what I've just read.

Do you have any advice on reading faster - still grasping the most out of it ?

Edited December 7, 2017 by Soulbass

[Joseph Maynor]

Don’t try to read faster.  Just be highly selective of the books you do read.  Skim if you must.  I get it, a lot of people do not know how to write-well, and our books are plagued by this.  There’s a lot of fluff in our books.  When you encounter fluff, just start to skim but catch all the golden-nuggets when you come upon those too.  Learning how to skim is key.  With many of these books you’re only gonna get two or three ideas from them — but those ideas are gonna be golden!  You may see that the book would’ve been better off written as a pamphlet than a book (they had to add a lot of bullshit in there to turn it into a book.)  But you do need to be reading books, lots of books.  Your education depends on it.  I’ve read hundreds of books myself.  If you want increased and even above-average education, you gotta read lots of books — even nowadays, when there is so much info available online.  Carefully research which books you will read.  It’s like marriage — pay very careful attention to the selection process.

Edited December 7, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Soulbass]

A book like "My Big TOE" by Tom Campbell would take me 5 hours reading a day, during 7 days (125 WPM).

This is without taking time for contemplation and taking notes - two weeks holidays, full time, seems more realistic.

I've asked my intuition (future self) to tell which books should I read first, metaphysics books were discarded...

It pointed practical psychology first.

 

Edited December 7, 2017 by Soulbass

[Michael569]

Many of the "fast readers" actually just fly unconsciously through the book and end up remembering nothing. I used to do that so that I could brag about how many books I've read.  Yes, you can probably do that with crappy vampire books but a true valuable book may take weeks, or even few months of note taking, underlining, practising and rewinding. 

Perhaps instead of that, think where you are wasting time in your daily schedule that could also be invested into reading. 

[BjarkeT]

The best thing i have found is to concentrate more intense to keep up the comprehension there is a book about it called deep work

[Faceless]

What’s the rush 

[Toby]

This app helped me with it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.heku.readingtrainer

It's more about that you train how you read, becoming more efficient. You can still read slowly and what not, but the main flaws regarding reading that one picked up get resolved with that app. There might be other apps or different platforms that have a similar effect of course.

[alyra]

my tip: identify better what it is you want out of reading faster. do you want to be able to scour passages for information? while faster readng is good- whole-reading is better. so practice reading everything at the pace you're comfortable with. naturally over time you will speed up. especially if you look out for indications that you're now more comfortable - and can pick up the pace - incorporate a new speed of reading than before. 

or maybe you want to learn every day? then stop reading everything - look at the chapter titles, often some of the chapters are not worth your goal in learning X from the book. skip 'em. some of the chapters are worth skimming through the first page to learn the intro of the idea. some of the chapters are worth skimming through everything. some of the chapters are worth reading carefully, some even worth re-reading lol! but you don't need to read the whole book.

 

or is something else important? knowing what your goal is helps structure a strategy to reach it. 

[Soulbass]

@alyra What I really want is to stop reading books and focus on practice/being. Before that I have to read few more books still, because I'm afraid to miss some information. I've read many books already, and I want now to stop watching for new stuff to feed my thoughts. Disconnecting from the internet is the ultimate point.

Reading "My Bit TOE" or "The Book of Not Knowing" (these are two big books) seems nice chilling moments, but it's nothing I can't discover on my own.

I like the idea that for learning yoga, you have to put yourself in the skin of the very first yogis and figure out everything from scratch.