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Date:         Sat, 22 Aug 1992 12:57:03 -0500
From:         "VALENTINE M. SMITH" <CDELL@UMKCVAX1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: On reading as a process

The debate about reading, and speeds, stirs me to this comment:

I read very fast, always have, by the "process of reading" as
opposed to any training. But I find I read different things at
different speeds.

I read history and political things very slowly, 30-50 pages at a
time, often skipping days. I just finished _Hitler and Stalin,
Parallel Lieves, but it took me six weeks to complete this over 1000
page monster.  But yesterday, I read a Noel Behn novel, _Seven silent
Men, in four and a half hours (450 pages). So, fiction goes VERY
fast, as does SF/fantasy, while poetry is a little slower going while
I try to absorb the images.

But, I completed nine books last week, twice completed three books in
a day, though only five of the six were read in those two days, and I
keep 50-80% of a book in some corner of my memory for up to five
years or so. If I have trouble recalling something, my natural speed
at reading allows re-reading some things.

So, I'm not sure I agree that "speed-reading" things negates their
worth to you. I've read 6950 books in the past 23 years and three
months, almost 300 a year, and I read 75-80% new stuff, and 20-25%
re-reads. I, like others of you, I'm sure, have my favorites - I
re-read the Ring trilogy about every 15 months, the Silmarillion very
three years, Thomas Harris' two novels about serial killers three
times each, and have read Richard Rhodes _The Making of the Atomic
Bomb three times since it came out in 1986.

My point is that no two of us has the same "process," and while some
of us follow the obsession of reading to almost ridiculous lengths,
it remains a critical behavior TO DO, no matter what process one
engages in. Tim's list startled me, as that's a lot of heavy
literture to devour at one time, but only a little. I've read three
of his five books, though not in any one week, two of the three I
read went quite quickly - Thurber's _My Life and Hard Times and
Camus' _The Fall. Marquez is a bit more convoluted.

I love Thurber, have written two papers about him since I began
school, and think that though his humor is a BIT dated, two of his
stories are classics in my mind - "The Secret Lives of Walter Mitty"
and "The Catbird Seat."  Recently (last year), I acquired the wartime
and pre-war (World War II) books (oversize, like a coffee table book)
of his, _Fables for Our Time (1940) and _The Seal in the Bedroom and
Other Predicaments (1932). A few of the cartoons from these two works
are in _My Life and Hard Times.

I think I like both the stories because they show us terribly
ordinary men doing rather extraordinary things, either in mind or
deed.  Anyway, I saw this message about reading, one of the three
great delights of my life, and felt compelled to answer. I believe
the process of reading IS important, though we can become too
critical of other people's processes, and WHAT we read is also
critically important (though I, like most, have my vices - like
detective/thriller stuff, John D. MacDonald ...). But, can any of us
truly judge another's "process," or what they choose to read? VMS
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