Reading Style: Is It OCD Not to Want to Miss Anything?

Ok, that’s called a “miscue” and not a mistake :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Same with me- I sometimes have force myself to slow down!

It seems odd, and even alarming, to me that some people do fast reads, followed (maybe) by re-reads. And yet I envy them their ability to read so much. I wonder whether this has something to do with (don’t beat me!) the recent trend in multi-tasking and shortened attention spans.

I think of reading as a participatory experience, not a passive one. If I were an author, I’d prefer to have engaged readers rather than ones who fly through, looking for plot points.

I’ve read pretty fast since I learned how to read. Back in the mid 50’s. Long before “multi-tasking & shortened attention spans” became fashionable buzz-words.

I’m not really looking for “plot points”–just going with the flow. Some details may not be entirely clear at the beginning, but the whole picture should become clear eventually. (In a good book, that is.)

You’re just a slow reader. It’s better than being a non-reader.

My boyfriend and I seem to read in completely different ways. He will go through a book in a day or two and I will take a week on the same book. I’m a voracious reader and have been ever since I was a small child, so it isn’t that reading presents any difficulty. I just prefer to take my time and ponder along the way and really try to get the most out of what I’m reading. And yet, at the end of the day, I’m always amazed that, regardless of his much swifter approach, he often has the same recollection of details in the book that I have, although I tend to have a bit more of an emotional connection to the book and the characters within.

What an interesting topic!

I tend to think of myself as a “careful reader”, although the slowness does frustrate me.

A couple of thoughts none of which may be directly helpful to you, but maybe they’ll give you, or someone else, something to chew on:

Firstly, if I were an author, I wouldn’t worry about engaged readers rather than those who fly through, I’d just worry about having readers (and buyers!) at all.

Secondly, if you wish to become an author and have engaged readers, there are ways in which you can encourage that behavior. I read a lot of romance novels. Some of them are silly and forgettable and formulaic, some of them have characters in novel situations, and make me ponder deeper issues–such as the relationship between environment and heredity in how children turn out.

But just by writing a romance novel and choosing a publisher*, the author is making choices about how I, the reader, will approach the book. Single Title or part of a series? Pure romance or Romantic Suspense? How important (and how explicit) is sex to this romance?

I had to laugh at myself the other day, as I read a romantic suspense book–heavy on the suspense–and was annoyed when the heroine waded back into danger. Confronting the Serial Killer is one of those things that Heroines Do in this type of novel, so had she made the smart choice and stayed away, I might well have felt a little disappointed in the lack of “closure”.

For a different perspective, let’s look at Tolkien. Tolkien’s works are deep, multi-layered stories from a place called Middle Earth. They reward re-reading because of the depth and complexity of the World Building which Tolkien did. But Tolkien didn’t build his world so deep and complex for the benefit of his readers as much as he did for his own enjoyment. (There was supposed to be more depth to this paragraph, but I’ve lost my train of thought–probably while typing the subsequent paragraphs).

Shakespeare or Chaucer are even more people who wrote intending to be appreciated by their contemporaries, but who have been fortunate enough to become icons, and thus people read them today–and must sometimes balance between understanding each phrase and enjoying the whole.

(Along these lines, I know that when I read the Bible, I enjoy reading stuff which is familiar better than stuff which is not familiar. If previous reading/study/sermons have taught me what a passage means in broad strokes, then re-reading it allows me to dig a little deeper. It can be fun comparing similar passages in different Gospels, for example. But I don’t always want to have to hold up each verse to the light and look at it from different angles before I can move on to the next verse.)
*We’ll pretend for a moment that romance novelists write novels and then figure out the details of who is publishing the novels, rather than writing novels designed to fit the criteria of a particular publisher (or line of books from a publisher).

I do the same sort of thing as far as re-reading paragraphs. The way I see it, the book was written for a reason, and I either read it completely or not. So I read and comprehend all of it.

Same with TV shows, I can’t stand it when people just have a show on in the background while they’re reading or talking on the phone and consider that “watching TV.”

As far as references go, I definitely want to understand the references but if no answer presents itself I’ll go ahead with the story.

I was once an indexer for a famous magazine and book perveyor. I read very much like the OP, but I think it’s more occupational than anything else.

I indexed befor there were a lot of tools or automation, we really did work off of index cards. We would read the text and start thinking about overarching concepts, repeated themes, and the like. Then hightlighting and using the cards, a second pass to start collecting the actual entries. The third pass was to check the work and pass it off to a final QA.

Now, although I read constantly to pass the time on the subway, I still can’t just read for enjoyment. Even though it’s been more than 20 years I still read like an indexer. Many authors will have a phrase they like, and I the trained indexer, still looking for repeated concepts, always latch on. Charles Stross (who I am currently reading) has used the phrase “grassy knoll” way too many time in accelerando for me to ignore it. That’s the current one that’s leaching my enjoyment in such a silly way. Yeah, I pick up on the eye color shifts and stuff like that, too. Luckily those happen less these days with search and replace.

The benefit is I am one kickass home Jeopardy player.

I don’t know about Carey’s books, but Martin and Erikson do a good job dropping references that help me remember where I’ve seen a character before. I still get a little lost but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the books.

Sometimes I use those little sticky tabs to mark a page if it looks like whatever happened will be important later. It’s easier than taking notes.