I love to read, but I hate to read

I love reading, but I hate reading. Now, before you start questioning how those two statements can exist simultaneously, let me explain. Even though I am a slow reader I enjoy reading, especially when it is something that I am interested in. I am not sure if it is because of what I am reading or how I am reading, but I feasibly only have forty-five minutes, at most, to read before my head flops back and I am out like a light. As you might imagine, this makes finishing a book a struggle. Additionally, I have this sense that I am not doing anything while I am reading, which (more often than I would like to admit) discourages me from picking up one of the books in my pile of books to read. That is why I can say accurately that I love to read, but I hate to read.

Given the effect that reading has on my ability to be awake it seems, at the very least, unwise that I would choose to take up a degree that is based almost exclusively in processing and synthesizing what I have read. The idea that I would finish a book that has 300 pages in three days is laughable, and as such the irony is not lost on me that book that teaches us how to read better would need to be skimmed. Thankfully, my issues with reading have helped me to develop some skills to process books quickly without have to read them through. At present they are a bit rusty having not been used in fifteen years or so, but I am feeling them come back to me.

Tables of contents and indices have become my friends. Being able to narrow down where what I need to learn will likely be located has helped me more times than I can count. Tables of contents have a good way of helping to sketch out the basic structure of what a book is about. I believe this is what Alder and Van Doren call x-raying the book. Knowing the underlying structure not only allows you to find the information you are looking for quicker, it can also help you to understand the structure of the author's argument. I have found that if I can find where the author states their premise and where they state their conclusions I can sometimes skip over their reasoning that connects the two. If the conclusion seems to not follow the premise then you can go back and fill in the reasoning, but frequently enough that is not needed. Unfortunately, reading for understanding generally means a deeper dive into a book and that means spending more time with it.

My wife tells me that the reason reading is difficult for me is that I feel the need to read every word in every sentence. She is right, when I read I am actively processing every word that I am reading. It seems that the first lesson I am to learn in this program is how to read for understanding without having to process every word in the many books I will be reading in the next three years. This also means I will likely spend a lot more time with Alder and Van Doren than I have been able to grant them over the last few days.