Notes on reading slowly
Last year I read a lot of books and remember almost none of them. I was reading the way you eat standing up, quickly and without tasting much. This summer I am trying the opposite: one book at a time, a few pages a day, with the paper notebook open next to it.
The book I started with was The Rings of Saturn, which turned out to be a good choice because it refuses to be read fast. The sentences go on for half a page, wander off into history, come back somewhere you did not expect. If you skim, you lose the thread completely. If you slow down, it is like walking with someone who keeps stopping to point at things.
A few habits that seem to help:
I read at the same time every day, after dinner, for about thirty minutes. Not more. Stopping while I still want to continue makes it easier to pick up the next evening.
I copy out one sentence per session. Only one. Choosing it forces me to actually pay attention, and the notebook is slowly filling with a strange collection of lines that remind me of the whole book when I reread them.
I let myself reread. If a paragraph did not land, I go back. This felt like a failure at first, as if I were a slow reader, but it is the only way some passages make sense.
I do not track numbers. I used to log every book and watch the yearly total climb, which made me choose short books and rush long ones. Without the count, a book takes as long as it takes.
At this pace I will read maybe a dozen books this year instead of forty. I think I will remember most of them.