Some of you people are nuts. I mean it’s one thing to recognize all the words you’re looking at and get the gist, but how can you really digest so much text in so short a time? When I am reading I am also trying to visualize what I’m reading and that means going at a fairly slow pace. I haven’t really timed myself, but I sure as hell can’t read an 800 page book in 5-6 hours as some people have claimed in here. Not even close.
If there were no other distractions, I’d say 2 days. Now, that isn’t likely to happen in real life, unless I’m sick in bed. As an adult, I’d see it would take me about a week. I try to take an hour in the morning to read as well as some time before bed.
Nope - when I really get into a book, I look around me sometimes and my real life seems unreal.
Rigamarole, I can read novels quickly (and I’m totally in the story, and visualizing all of it), but when it comes to non-fiction, my reading speed slows way down. Novels are an easy read.
I just don’t see how people can actually absorb that many pages of text that fast. If I just read the words as fast as I could without regard for comprhension I don’t think I could cut through 4 pages a minute.
Do you visualize what you’re reading or is it just words? Books tend to play like movies when I read. What is it like for you?
Sorry, I just happen to be a fast reader. Lousy hand to eye coordination, though.
Do you like RPGs? There are many in which, when you create a character, you have to choose some sort of “talents” (the name changes by game); these are things which will not make that person show up in any Mutie Detector or enormously change the course of History, but which can sometimes come in real handy. They are also things which those who have them tend to take for granted, whereas those who don’t can’t figure out “how the bloody blazes does he do that?!?!” in a million years.
I happen to have the “can read maps” talent, the “fast reader” talent, the “can’t really tell time except if it happens to be Time To Eat NOW” and the “can’t toss a balled-up piece of paper into the trash can from a distance greater than minus half an inch” antitalent. Also the “can’t run worth shite” and the “swims like a spastic frog” antitalents. No merit of mine on the positive ones, no blame on the others.
ETA: to answer your last question, if the book really grabs me, I visualize and hear the voices (which can be a problem if someone makes a movie), but I don’t make an effort to do this, it just happens. If it’s not happening by itself, I can’t cause it to happen.
About 8-16 hours over 2-3 days, depending on how important nuance seemed to be. For King, closer to 8 hours.
When I was in 11th grade, my school offered this special “study methods” training. Of course it wasn’t the bad students who got signed up for it: it was those of us who were actually good students but whose parents would not have been satisfied if their child was a cross of the best qualities of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Charles Barkley.
About half of the program was spent on “learning to read faster;” according to the teacher, people who read following the text with a finger or vocalizing read at about 40 words per minute, those who don’t at 70 words per minute; that is, normal readers read at about the same speed at which people speak. That’s with perfect comprehension. Logically, a text that’s difficult (vocabulary, typos, text composition, bad grammar) gets read more slowly. Text composition makes more of a difference for fast readers than for slow or normal readers (I read whole lines on books, one-third lines on the SDMB because the lines are too wide to process them as a single chunk; unjustified texts drive me bonkers).
Thank you for informing me it’s out!
and now something on topic:
I used to read a lot when I was (supposed to be) studying (I think I once clocked myself on 100 pages per hour, but that was a Pratchett, on something a bit more technical I am a lot slower).
Since joining the work force this has petered out somewhat, so I think now it’ll take me about 2 or 3 weeks to read a 1000 page book (I think I steal read as fast as I used to, but I generally just spend less time reading) and only if I like it and am not reading a bunch of other books at the same time.
I probably don’t visualize as much as you do. In some cases, I try NOT to visualize, in fact, and I fail at this, and then I stay up when I should be sleeping because the clowns are, in fact, going to eat me. I remember reading part of one Stephen King novel, noting that it was time to go to bed, and then being too scared to turn off the lights until I’d made a little cross out of two bobby pins. And I’m an atheist!
Having said that, Stephen King books are EXTREMELY fast reads. They don’t require a lot of mental effort on my part. I know that he’ll probably set the story in rural New England, and that he’ll have mostly sympathetic characters who are just so cute and folksy that I’m gonna want to throw up. A book by Vernor Vinge will take me much longer to get through, because he’ll throw much more complicated concepts my way, and once I UNDERSTAND that the aliens are actually not individuals in one body, but each individual consists of several bodies, and an individual will change when its bodies die off and get replaced, I’ll have to go back to the beginning of the book and re-read it with my new knowledge. Since Vinge might throw several of these concepts at his readers in one novel, I usually need to start over a couple of times. He’ll usually have a brand new setting for each story, or so much time has passed between stories that the setting is almost the same as new. I swear, next time I’m taking notes when I start one of his new novels!
Too, you have to remember that people who would be interested in the Straight Dope in general, message boards in general, and the SDMB would tend to be pretty fast readers, people who read for amusement and have lots of practice at it. So I would expect that the Teeming Millions, on average, read more and faster than the average person who lives in the same area and has the same general background and education.
It really depends on how engaging the plot is. I have known to devour entir 500-page novel in one night if the plot hooks me on. Yes, I be tired, I misread stuff and miss key sentences, but Iknow what happened.
The paperback version of Shogun is 1200 pages and I read that in about 10 days, I was not trying to get through it as fast as possible.
This is totally how I read. As I said before, when I’m reading something, I am there. I picked up Duma Key last week, and have been reading it off and on. It’s like my Tivo - I mentally hit the “play” key, and the movie is back on in my head.
This has led to many problems, with Stephen King in particular. His books are so easy to visualize that I know the exact layout of The Outlook Hotel, the jail in Shawshank Redemption and the market in The Mist. I also know how all of the characters look and how they sound. So when the movies come out, I automatically hate them because they’re wrong.
Even though I have read the book 900 times, I couldn’t make it through The Stand miniseries. Molly Ringwald as Frannie? That’s absurd! I was actually getting mad because the dialogue wasn’t exact…
I’m sure I’m in for a surprise when I get to vacation in Maine, since it will look nothing like I’ve imagined it 
My dad’s theory is that my brother and I are so fast because we don’t mentally pronounce the words, we just visualize. Whereas he needs to say every word in his head to understand what he’s reading.
Yeah, I didn’t know other people heard the words in their heads until I spent at least an hour telling my boyfriend that, no, I don’t hear the words in my head, who does that? He reads much more slowly than I do.
I’m not really sure, but I’ll put it this way. I won’t take a novel I’m half finised to a doctors appoinment, I don’t want to get stuck reading out date magazines.
That’s part of why I bought a Kindle. Not only can you have several books on it, but you can buy them on the fly!
How on earth do you read with out sounding out the words? I’ve been trying for the last hour or so and it just doesn’t work. Just glancing at a word makes me start pronouncing it automatically. Has anyone seen any studies on the way people read with regards to sounding/not sounding? I would be very interested in seeing if this is something that can be learned and how one would go about doing that.
I’ve been wondering about this as well.
And not only that, but I was taught by one of my junior high English teachers how to bring dialog to life and make it richer by infusing the characters’ words with emotion appropriate to the situation–mentally sounding out the words like an actor would say them in a movie.
So I’m wondering about the quality of the reading experience if the words are only registered visually, as well as how to do it in the first place.
No study, but for me personally, when I see the word, I don’t see the letters or think about how it is spoken. I see what the word is supposed to represent. So, if I read “horse” in my brain, I’m not thinking “Hhhhh…orrr.sss…” I am thinking of a picture of a horse.
Then, I fill in the blanks based on the context, so if the horse is running, then the horse I see has hair blowing back, legs raised, etc. If the context describes the horse, I use that; if not, I make my own horse, say, a brown one with a white spot over his nose.
This is what makes it so tricky when they are translated for a movie. I’m also having an issue with my current read through of Duma Key - the main character is supposed to be white, but I still see him as a black guy, which is how I made him on my first read through. :smack:
You guys have got me thinking about visualizing versus sounding out the words - I would say that the words I’m reading are halfway between just looking at them and actually sounding them out in my head. Say if I was singing along with a song in my head, I would be sub-vocalizing the words. When I’m reading, it doesn’t get that far - the words sort of go into my brain, create a picture, but aren’t sounded out.
ETA: Fast readers don’t actually look at all the words, either - we pattern match. It has happened to me more than once that I pattern-matched a word, it didn’t make sense, then I had to go back and actually look at the word to see what was actually there. I had “seen” the word as I was reading - my brain filled in the pattern it expected.