Speed Reading

I love reading. I’ve always got a few books on the go at once. I also like variety, so I do read books from a wide range of genres. Years ago I set up a simple set of lists to keep track of my reading:

• Books Read – I keep a list of the books I have read as I complete them. In my personal journal I also write a short review. This might only be a couple of lines but it’s often really useful to prompt me when I look back. It also gets my critical faculties going which is no bad thing. 
• Books to Read – I have a list of the books that I have bought or borrowed that I have yet to read. This list also includes virtual books in Kindle or iBooks and PDFs of books too. This list just seems to grow and grow. At the last count it had reached 120.
• Books to get hold of – this is a list of books that I want to get. It’s a paper list, but I also use Amazon’s Wish List to capture as well.

That middle list is getting bigger as I buy books at a faster rate than I am reading them. I tend to read about 30 – 40 books a year. Now, some books don’t take long to read, whilst others can take quite a big commitment.

That’s where this idea came from. When I was doing my PhD a few years ago I learnt how to speed read, and I also learnt how to glean from a book what I want from it. It’s not always necessary to read every word that exists in a book.

If you consider that reading books at 50 per year, it’s not possible to read more than 2,500 books in an average adult life. Then you realise that it is important to be selective about what you read, and also to ensure that you maximise the learning by being selective about the time commitment given to each book.

With this in mind, I am going to sift through my list of 120 books and select out 20 that can be speed read. They will be books that can be read quickly either because of the length, content or because I only need a small part of it. Having selected the 20 books I will then read one or two a week. I’m curious to find out how this goes. Wish me luck!