I read seventy-three books last year. That number sounds impressive until I tell you that I remember maybe eight of them well enough to have a real conversation about what was in them. The rest left a vague residue: a feeling, a fragment of plot, an image or two. Gone within weeks.

This bothered me enough that I started paying attention to how I read, not just what I read. And what I found was that I’d become, without realizing it, a speed reader. Not in the formal sense of someone who took a course and learned to scan lines of text. In the cultural sense. I’d absorbed the ambient message that more is better, that a long reading list is a mark of a serious person, and that the point of picking up a book is to get through it.

Getting through it. As if a book were an obstacle between you and the next book.

I think a lot of readers have ended up in the same place. Not deliberately, but gradually. And I think something real is lost when we read this way.

When speed became the default

There’s always been a competitive element to reading. Samuel Johnson was famous for tearing through books. Theodore Roosevelt supposedly read a book a day during his presidency. But the modern version of this competition feels different. It’s quantified. Goodreads has a yearly reading challenge. Bookstagram accounts announce their monthly tallies. End-of-year lists are measured in volume as much as quality.

None of this is inherently bad. Setting reading goals can be motivating. Sharing what you’ve read builds community. The problem arises when the number becomes the point, when you start choosing shorter books to stay on pace, or when you feel guilty about spending three weeks with a novel that deserves three weeks.

The speed reading industry is part of this, though it’s been around longer than social media. Courses and apps promise to double or triple your reading speed with techniques like chunking, minimizing subvocalization, and using a pointer to guide your eyes. These techniques work, in the narrow sense that they increase the number of words your eyes pass over per minute. Whether they increase comprehension or retention is another question, and the research on that is not encouraging.

A 2016 study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest reviewed decades of speed reading research and concluded that there’s a fundamental trade-off between speed and understanding. You can go faster, but you’ll understand less. The authors were blunt about it: there is no free lunch when it comes to reading speed.

What slow reading actually means

When I talk about slow reading, I don’t mean anything mystical or precious. I don’t mean reading by candlelight while wearing a velvet robe. I mean paying attention. Reading at the speed of thought rather than the speed of ambition.

In practice, this looks like several things.

It means reading a sentence and sitting with it before moving to the next one. Not every sentence. Some sentences are functional; they move you from one idea to the next and don’t need lingering over. But some sentences contain an entire world, and if you blast past them at full speed, you miss it.

It means rereading paragraphs that didn’t fully land. Not because you’re a slow reader, but because the writer put something there that rewards a second look. Good prose is layered. A fast read catches the surface. A slow read catches the rest.

It means putting the book down periodically to think about what you just read. This drives some people crazy. They want momentum. They want the narrative pull that carries them forward. And I get that. There’s real pleasure in being swept along by a book. But there’s also pleasure in stopping to ask: what just happened there? Why did the writer make that choice? How does this passage change what came before it?

It means, sometimes, reading out loud. This is the one that draws the most skepticism, so let me make the case. Prose has a rhythm. Good prose has a specific, intentional rhythm that you can hear. When you read silently, especially at speed, you flatten that rhythm. When you read aloud, even in a whisper, you feel it. The cadence, the weight of certain words, the way a long sentence gives way to a short one. These things are part of the reading experience. They’re part of what the writer crafted. Speed reading erases them.

A book that changed when I slowed down

I want to be specific, because this isn’t an abstract argument for me.

Three years ago I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for the first time. I read it quickly. I thought it was fine. Beautiful prose, not much plot, a quiet book about a quiet man. I put it on my yearly list and moved on.

Last year I picked it up again because a friend insisted I’d missed something. I read it slowly this time. Two, maybe three chapters a night. I’d stop when a passage struck me and sit with it. I’d reread the letters the narrator writes to his son, paying attention not just to what he says but to what he doesn’t say, to the gaps and silences.

It was a different book. Or rather, it was the same book and I was a different reader. The grief in it, the complicated love, the theological wrestling that I’d breezed past the first time, all of it opened up because I gave it space to open. I finished it shaken in a way I hadn’t been by a novel in years.

I’m not saying you have to read every book this way. Some books are meant to be consumed quickly. Thrillers, for instance, are engineered for speed; slowing down can actually work against their design. But literary fiction, poetry, serious nonfiction, memoir: these forms reward patience in ways that speed undermines.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is another book that works this way. It’s a memoir built on accumulation, on small details that gather weight over pages and chapters. Rush through it and you’ll think it’s pleasant but slight. Read it slowly and the emotional architecture reveals itself. The book is doing something careful and deliberate, and it asks for a reader willing to be careful and deliberate in return.

The economics working against slow reading

I don’t want to be naïve about why people read fast. Time is finite. Most adults are busy. The list of books you want to read grows faster than you can possibly shrink it. Reading faster feels like a rational response to a genuine problem.

There’s also the publishing industry itself, which produces an enormous number of new titles every year. In the United States alone, somewhere around 500,000 new books are published annually. That number includes self-published titles and academic works, but even filtering for trade books, the number is staggering. The sheer volume creates pressure to keep up, to stay current, to have read the thing everyone’s talking about.

Social media amplifies this. Book recommendations cycle through feeds at the speed of every other kind of content. A book has maybe two weeks in the cultural spotlight before the conversation moves on. If you haven’t read it by then, you feel left out. So you read faster, finish sooner, move to the next one.

The result is a kind of treadmill. You read more but enjoy it less. You accumulate titles but not experiences. You can list what you’ve read but not articulate what it did to you.

What we lose at speed

Let me try to name specifically what’s lost when we read too fast.

We lose subtext. Most good writing operates on at least two levels: what’s being said and what’s being implied. Speed reading catches the first level and mostly misses the second. In a novel, this means missing the emotional undercurrents between characters. In nonfiction, it means missing the qualifications and complications that make an argument honest rather than simplistic.

We lose the writer’s craft. This is an aesthetic loss. A beautifully constructed paragraph, a perfectly placed image, a transition that does something clever with time, all of these become invisible at speed. You might register them unconsciously, but you don’t experience them. It’s like walking through a museum at a jog. You see the paintings, technically. But you don’t look at them.

We lose the internal conversation. Reading, real reading, is a dialogue between the book and the reader’s own experience. When you slow down, you bring your own life to the text. You remember things. You make connections. You argue with the author. You feel things you didn’t expect to feel. Speed reading short-circuits this process. The book washes over you instead of engaging you.

We lose retention. This is the most measurable loss. If you read a book at speed and can’t recall its main arguments or its plot six months later, what was the point? You spent the time. You didn’t get the benefit. Slower reading, with pauses for reflection, produces better long-term memory. This isn’t mysticism. It’s cognitive science.

The rereading question

Rereading is the most radical form of slow reading, and it’s become almost countercultural. The assumption in reading culture is that rereading is a waste of time. There are too many new books to read; why go back to one you’ve already read?

I understand this argument. I also think it’s wrong.

When you reread a book, you’re not having the same experience again. You’ve changed since the first reading. The world has changed. The book hasn’t, but the reader has, and reading is always a collaboration between the two. A novel you read at twenty-two and a novel you read again at forty-two will feel like two different books, because in some real sense, they are.

Vladimir Nabokov, who knew something about reading, argued that the only way to read a book is to reread it. The first time, he said, you’re just getting oriented. You’re learning the landscape. The second time, you actually begin to see.

I wouldn’t go as far as Nabokov. Some books give you everything on the first pass. But the ones that don’t, the ones that feel like they have more going on than you were able to absorb, those books are asking to be reread. And rereading them is a better use of your time than racing through three new books you’ll forget by next month.

Practical suggestions for slowing down

If you’re convinced, even partially, here are some things that have helped me.

Drop your reading goal, or at least stop counting. I deleted the Goodreads reading challenge from my profile. It felt like a small rebellion, and it removed a source of pressure I didn’t need. I still track what I read, but I don’t set a number. The absence of a target changed how I read almost immediately.

Read physical books when possible. Screens encourage skimming. The scroll gesture, the blue light, the proximity of notifications, all of it pushes you toward speed. A physical book has a different tempo. You can’t scroll it. You can only turn pages, and the physical act of turning a page creates natural pauses.

Give yourself permission to abandon books. This sounds like the opposite of slow reading advice, but it isn’t. If you’re not enjoying a book or getting something from it, put it down. The point of slow reading isn’t to slog through everything at half speed. It’s to give your full attention to the books that deserve it. Life is too short to read books you don’t care about, slowly or otherwise.

Read with a pencil. Marginalia forces engagement. You can’t annotate at full speed. The act of underlining a sentence or writing a note in the margin pulls you out of passive consumption and into active reading. If you’re using a library book, keep a notebook nearby instead.

Try reading the same book at different times of day. This sounds odd, but I’ve found that a book reads differently in the morning than at night. Morning reading tends to be more analytical. Evening reading tends to be more emotional. Both are valid. Both reveal different things.

Talk about what you’re reading. Not in a performative way, but genuinely. Tell a friend about the chapter you just finished. Try to articulate what it made you think or feel. This forces you to process what you’ve read, which deepens your engagement with the text.

The deeper question

Behind all of this is a question about what reading is for.

If reading is for information transfer, then speed makes sense. You want the data. Get it fast. Move on. There are plenty of things worth reading this way: news articles, emails, instruction manuals, most of what crosses your screen in a given day.

But if reading is for something more, for the experience of being inside another person’s consciousness, for the slow alteration of your own thinking and feeling, for the pleasure of language itself, then speed works against you. You’re optimizing for the wrong variable.

I think about this a lot in relation to the books we publish at ScrollWorks. When Catherine Voss wrote The Last Archive, she spent four years crafting sentences that reward close attention. Every paragraph has been worked and reworked. The prose is dense, not in the sense of being difficult, but in the sense of being rich. There’s a lot happening on every page. A speed reader will get the plot. A slow reader will get the experience.

The same is true of James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, which uses historical detail the way a painter uses brushstrokes. You can step back and see the big picture. But if you lean in, the detail itself is where the art lives.

These books were written slowly. They deserve to be read slowly. That’s not a marketing pitch. It’s a statement about what the books are.

A modest proposal

I’m not asking anyone to give up speed reading entirely. Sometimes you need to get through a book quickly. Sometimes the book itself doesn’t warrant deep attention. Reading is not a monolith; it’s a collection of practices, and different practices suit different situations.

What I am suggesting is balance. If you read fifty books this year and remember five of them, consider reading twenty-five next year and remembering fifteen. The math of enrichment doesn’t work the way the math of productivity does. More is not always more.

Pick one book this month and read it slowly. Really slowly. A chapter a day, or less. Read it with a pencil. Read some of it aloud. Put it down when you need to think. Come back to it. Let it work on you the way good books are supposed to: gradually, cumulatively, changing you in ways you don’t notice until you’re done and you realize you see something differently than you did before.

That’s what reading can be. Not a race. Not a list. Not a performance. Just a conversation between you and a book, with all the time in the world.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.