The recommendations for more effective reading largely match those in Mortimer Adler's
How to Read a Book, particularly chapters 2 (The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading) and 7 (How to X-Ray a Book). Both address how to rapidly determine a book's
structure. More generally, Adler suggests approaching reading with
intent, that is, what are your goals in reading a book, often corresponding to the type of book. Fiction is different from poetry, practical books, history, science and mathematics, philosophy, and social science (each addressed in the book).
I'm reminded of an HN perennial, "Why GNU grep is Fast" (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug..., discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626305), which boils down to two rules:
#1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT
EVERY INPUT BYTE.
#2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW
INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it does look at.
If you want to read faster, read less, and read more intelligently.
By "read less", I mean simply don't waste your time on irrelevant material. For pleasure reading, this doesn't mean skipping large parts of books, in general (there ... are exceptions), but it could very well mean skipping entire books, or deciding that you really don't want to read them. For nonfiction, it may very well mean sucking the marrow out of their bones without getting bogged into the detail. There are few writers who are highly synoptic and for whom all words matter (this is more common in philosophy than elsewhere, though I can think of other examples).
By "more intelligently", I mean understanding what you hope to gain (amusement/entertainment, general information, specific answers to questions, understanding or rebutting an author's arguments, etc.). Skip what doesn't address that goal, and stop once you've attained it.
There is a tremendous amount of published material. There have been about 300,000 traditionally published books annually in English since the 1950s, if not before, and over the past decade or so, "non-traditional" ("vanity", self-published, print-on-demand, ebooks, etc.) raise that number well over 1 million. Given roughly 300 million to 1 billion native English speakers, this means one book per 300 to 1,000 people.
Quality literature is far less common. Many authors have commented on the folly of reading other-than-excellent books. I'd suggest some sampling of the common genres, but ... don't get stuck there, if you can help it.
Shopenhaer addresses this in "On Authorship and Style":
Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...
Diderot the broader problem of a superfluity of books and information overload:
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877
(This was, of course, a solutions-oriented pitch for a technical IT solution Diderot was launching, the Encyclpaedia.)
A depressing tendency of most speed-reading programmes, and discussions, I've encountered, is that few show any wareness of these extant models and guides. Which makes one wonder if their authors actually read intelligently....
I'm reminded of an HN perennial, "Why GNU grep is Fast" (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug..., discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626305), which boils down to two rules:
#1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT EVERY INPUT BYTE.
#2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it does look at.
If you want to read faster, read less, and read more intelligently.
By "read less", I mean simply don't waste your time on irrelevant material. For pleasure reading, this doesn't mean skipping large parts of books, in general (there ... are exceptions), but it could very well mean skipping entire books, or deciding that you really don't want to read them. For nonfiction, it may very well mean sucking the marrow out of their bones without getting bogged into the detail. There are few writers who are highly synoptic and for whom all words matter (this is more common in philosophy than elsewhere, though I can think of other examples).
By "more intelligently", I mean understanding what you hope to gain (amusement/entertainment, general information, specific answers to questions, understanding or rebutting an author's arguments, etc.). Skip what doesn't address that goal, and stop once you've attained it.
There is a tremendous amount of published material. There have been about 300,000 traditionally published books annually in English since the 1950s, if not before, and over the past decade or so, "non-traditional" ("vanity", self-published, print-on-demand, ebooks, etc.) raise that number well over 1 million. Given roughly 300 million to 1 billion native English speakers, this means one book per 300 to 1,000 people.
Quality literature is far less common. Many authors have commented on the folly of reading other-than-excellent books. I'd suggest some sampling of the common genres, but ... don't get stuck there, if you can help it.
Shopenhaer addresses this in "On Authorship and Style":
Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...
Diderot the broader problem of a superfluity of books and information overload:
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877
(This was, of course, a solutions-oriented pitch for a technical IT solution Diderot was launching, the Encyclpaedia.)
A depressing tendency of most speed-reading programmes, and discussions, I've encountered, is that few show any wareness of these extant models and guides. Which makes one wonder if their authors actually read intelligently....