5 Ways to Read Faster When You’re in a Bind
by Adam Krause
Let’s get this out of the way right now: you should never skim great literature. The comic intricacies of Gustave Flaubert’s prose should not be reduced to the details of his plot and Walt Whitman’s poetry deserves to be read at length, and out loud.
However, if you are really in a bind – say if you were writing a history paper until four A.M. the night before, and also studying for a physics midterm – you have to plan as much time as you can afford to focus on studying the book in question so that when it is your turn to present you will be prepared to talk about it. Here are 5 tips to speed read your way out of a bind.
1) Identify the crucial information.
Unlike, say, a well-ordered economics or chemistry textbook, a literary novel is not likely to signpost its meaning with bullet points, bar graphs or a synopsis at the end of every chapter. And if it does, beware: even footnotes, in a postmodern novel like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, are additional slippery layers to the story disguised as helpful side information.
However, you can still isolate the places where the most significant content in a novel, story or poem is likely to be found.
A novel, in the eyes of many impatient readers, lives or dies by its first paragraph or first chapter, and that is where the tone, style and thematic resonances of the work are established. The last chapter, while it may contain a final image that encapsulates the entire book (such as “…he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” at the end of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run) is usually a denouement, a falling action that quietly wraps up what came before. For the last significant plot twist you really need to know about, look for the climax about four-fifths of the way through the book. This works for short stories as well, on a compressed scale, though a story generally makes less time for falling action than a novel does. In both cases, look for the sentences at the ends of paragraphs (particularly a paragraph of physical description) to bear the brunt of the paragraph’s meaning.
While skimming poems, keep in mind that the poet almost always wants to end strong, and the most content-heavy lines in a poem are usually in the last lines or last stanza. If you’re in a hurry, read the title, the first stanza (which establishes the poem’s premise, or at least a starting point that it will then digress from and return to in some more complex way), then the last stanza, then the first lines of each stanza in between to fill in the bare outline of what you missed. Not the best way to enjoy the poet’s art, but it might keep you from stammering in surprise if your teacher asks you which road Robert Frost’s traveler ended up taking. (Hint: it’s not the expressway.)
2) Take in as much as you can at once, not necessarily in order.
Print is an interesting hybrid medium, in that it imitates the rhythms of speech – which take a certain amount of time to listen to – by putting them into a visual format that can theoretically be apprehended all at once. Ask a speed reader who can read in excess of 700 words a minute, and they will say that a large part of their technique involves reading multiple words simultaneously. This takes practice, but you can look at a page of print and pick out information – say, all the proper nouns, or the few lines of dialogue, or shorter, quicker sentences to convey action – without having to read each word in order, at least not the first time through. Then, using what you know about how sentences in English are put together, assemble them in your mind while digesting the page for comprehension and moving on to the next.
This is unlikely to work for poetry, where unusual, even ungrammatical syntax is often the norm. Poets know that some ideas are just too big to be conveyed in a small space by keeping words in the order you’re used to seeing them.
3) Don’t get bogged down.
Hemingway famously said that he wrote short stories in which not a word could be removed without changing the entire story’s effect. However, not all writers – not all great writers, even – hold themselves to this standard. Try to figure out which aspects of the text you are reading will be crucial to the discussion, and which are tangential or even repetitive. When reading a long Russian novel, you don’t have to linger over the names Katerina Ivanovna or Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov as if you needed to pronounce them perfectly. As soon as you know who does what in a scene, move on. The same goes for vocabulary words you aren’t sure of, especially if they are technical or specific to a certain time or culture: don’t spend too long trying to decipher them. You can always bring them up in class, which will undoubtedly be a relief to those of your classmates who didn’t understand that word either, but didn’t want to say anything.
Okay, let’s say worst comes to worst. You’ve speed-read as much as you can, but class is starting and you still haven’t finished the assigned reading. The last two tips are designed to help you deal with this emergency situation.
4) Get extra-textual.
So you haven’t read the book. What else do you know about it? Maybe the course is limited to one author or a small handful of authors, and you have discussed other works by the same writer before. Maybe the book is situated within a particular literary movement or historical context. You might even be able to get a discussion going about the book’s effect on the reading public (what is known in academic circles as reception theory.) For instance, you don’t have to have read James Joyce’s Ulysses to know that fans around the world celebrate Bloomsday every year on June 16, the day on which the entirety of the novel takes place.
There is bound to be someone in the room, besides you, who is more interested in the context of the book than what’s inside its covers. As French literature professor Pierre Bayard, author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, attests: “It’s possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it.”
5) Steer the class discussion toward what you *have* read.
Students often don’t realize how much control they have over the direction that class discussions take. Your teacher may have specific nuggets of wisdom she wants to draw out of the text, but a significant amount of her preparation to teach it has probably been geared around ways to stimulate her students to talk about it on their own.
As long as what you have to say is not too tangential to the day’s reading, feel free to bring a close reading to that one passage that tripped you up or intrigued you. Your teacher will more than likely be glad that you are helping to carry the discussion along the lines of your own interests. Even if another student changes the subject to a section of the book you are less familiar with, you’ve already done your part, and probably earned your class participation credit for the day. Lean back in your seat, slip your ear buds on under your new winter hat, and crank up the volume.
