The Case for Reading Slowly

There is a particular silence that settles over a room when someone is reading properly: not scanning, not searching, just reading. It is rarer now than it used to be, and I have started to collect it the way other people collect records. I hear it on trains sometimes, usually in the quiet carriage, usually from someone over sixty. I heard it once in a launderette on Pellier Street, coming from a teenager with a library copy of something thick and a bag of wet towels at her feet. She missed the end of her cycle by twenty minutes and did not seem to mind.

This is an essay about that silence, and about a long, slightly ridiculous experiment I ran on myself. I wrote most of it by hand, over three winters, at the same table where the experiment happened. I mention that only because it explains the pace. You may find it slow. That is more or less the point.

Fig. 2. One book, a pot plant and a cup gone cold. Drawing by Almanac.

Three winters, one book

For three winters I read one book. Not exclusively, but deliberately. I kept it on the kitchen table and read a few pages each morning before anything with a screen was allowed near me. Some days I only read a sentence and then sat with it until the coffee went cold. The table is pine, scarred by forty years of somebody else’s breakfasts, and it sits under a window that looks out onto a brick wall about eleven feet away. There is nothing to look at, so you look at the page.

The book was The Lighthouse Accounts, a novel by Odile Ferrand that came out in 1961 and has drifted in and out of print ever since. My copy is a secondhand paperback that cost £2.50 from a stall outside the covered market, with a previous owner’s name (M. Hales) written inside the cover in green ink. It is 412 pages long. I finished it, the first time, roughly fourteen weeks after I started, and then I put it back on the table the following November and began again.

I should say why. The honest answer is that I had stopped being able to read. Not literally: I was reading more words than ever. But I could no longer get to the bottom of a page without my eyes sliding to the corner of it, looking for the exit. I edit a publication for a living. This seemed like a problem worth taking seriously.

The rules were few:

1. The book stayed on the table.

2. The phone stayed in the hall, on the shelf above the radiator, until I had read something.

3. There was no target.

The first fortnight

The first fortnight was humiliating. On the first morning I read four pages and then realised I had been thinking about a spreadsheet for three of them. On the second morning I got up to check whether the phone in the hall had made a noise. It had not. It was on silent. I knew it was on silent because I had put it on silent myself, eleven minutes earlier.

The tomato timer

By the fourth day I had started timing myself with the kitchen timer, the old wind-up kind shaped like a tomato that came with the flat. I set it for twenty minutes and was not allowed to stand up until it rang. On the fourth day I lasted nine. On the fifth, fourteen. On the seventh, a Sunday, I got the full twenty and then sat on for another ten without noticing, and when I looked up the light on the brick wall had moved, and I felt as though I had come back from somewhere.

My sister Agathe, who came to stay for a weekend in the second week, thought the whole thing was a stunt. She is a pharmacist and reads about forty books a year, mostly crime, mostly on her phone. She watched me sit with the tomato timer and said, at the end, “You do know you could just read it.” I said that was what I was doing. She said, “No, you’re performing reading it,” and went to make toast. She was not entirely wrong.

The performance wore off. Around the third week the timer went back in the drawer. The reading did not get faster. If anything it got slower, because I had started paying attention to what was actually in front of me, which was a lighthouse keeper called Bastien Rolle counting oil drums by lamplight on an island off the north coast, and getting the number wrong.

What speed takes away

Fast reading is a kind of harvesting. You go in for the information, you take it, you leave. It is useful, and most of what we read deserves nothing more. But some books are not fields to be harvested. They are places to live in for a while, and they only reveal themselves to people who stay.

What speed takes away, I think, is not comprehension. I understood The Lighthouse Accounts perfectly well the first time I read it, years ago, on a beach, in two afternoons. What I could not have told you is what it felt like to be inside it: the way Ferrand lets a scene run on past the point where anything is happening, so that you start to feel the length of a keeper’s night shift in your own shoulders. Read at speed, those passages look like padding. Read slowly, they are the whole book.

A book read slowly becomes a room you can return to. A book read quickly is a corridor you have already forgotten.

A book read slowly becomes a room you can return to. A book read quickly is a corridor you have already forgotten. I don’t say that to be pious about it. I have forgotten hundreds of corridors and I do not miss most of them.

The case against

There is a reasonable case against all this, and the person who made it best was a friend of mine called Pascal Ndiaye, a solicitor who gets through something like a hundred and twenty books a year, all of them fast, and can discuss them, quote them, find the weak chapter. Over dinner in the second winter he told me that slow reading was a fetish of people who did not have enough to read. “If you only had one book,” he said, “of course you’d make it last. That’s what prisoners do.”

I have a better answer now than I did then, which is that he and I were not doing the same thing. Pascal reads across. He wants to know how books talk to each other, which ideas are in the air that year. That needs speed and volume, and it is a real way of knowing. I was trying to read down, into one book, until I hit something I could not get past. Both are reading. He sent me a postcard last spring that said only “Still harvesting.” It is on the fridge.

The architecture of sentences

When I slowed down, I started noticing the architecture of sentences. Where the writer paused. Where they hurried. Ferrand, it turns out, uses the word patient eleven times in the first hundred pages and then never again after the storm in chapter nine. I only know this because I was going slowly enough to start counting. I wrote to her estate to ask whether it was deliberate and have not heard back, which is fair.

In the second winter I started reading some passages aloud, at a low volume, to the brick wall. This is the most useful thing I learned and also the most embarrassing to admit. A sentence you read aloud cannot be skimmed. Your mouth will not let you. You find out very quickly where the writer meant you to breathe, and in Ferrand’s case the places where she withholds a breath are almost always the places where something is about to go wrong for Bastien. My mouth noticed in a week.

What the margins hold

I wrote in the margins in pencil, then in a blue fineliner when the pencil started to smudge. By the end of the first winter they had filled with small arguments and agreements: “no”, “yes, but why here?”, “she’s lying”, and on one page, simply, “cold today”. That last one is about the kitchen, on the morning the boiler broke, and I am glad it is there.

The margins also turned out to be a record of my own three years. You can find the week my father was in hospital, because the notes stop for nine days and then start again in a different pen, smaller and more careful. A book you keep on the table for three winters ends up holding some of what happened around it, the way a coat pocket ends up holding receipts.

M. Hales left no notes, only the name in green ink and a bus ticket from 1987 tucked into page 300 as a bookmark. I have kept the ticket where it was. Whoever M. Hales was, they stopped reading there, or at least they stopped there once. I think about that more than I expected to.

Who gets to go slowly

The most useful letter I had about this essay came from a reader called Delphine Archer, who works nights as a care assistant in a residential home on the edge of town. She wrote, very politely, that she would love to read one book for three winters, and that to do it she would need a kitchen table, a quiet morning and a job that started after nine. She reads in fifteen-minute pieces on her breaks, on her phone, under a strip light. Her letter ended like this:

I am not reading fast because I have lost something. I am reading fast because it is the only speed I have.

Delphine Archer, in a letter to the editor

She is right. Slowness, in the form I practised it, needed things I am lucky to have: a flat with a table in it, a job I can start late, nobody small asking me for breakfast. I wrote back to Delphine and asked whether the fifteen minutes ever felt like the thing I was describing. She said sometimes, at about four in the morning, when the building was quiet and nobody needed her. She said it felt like being let off.

A practice, not a rule

None of this is a rule. I still skim the news and speed through instructions like everyone else. I read most of this publication’s submissions at a pace I would not like the writers to see. Reading slowly is not a virtue so much as a practice, like walking instead of driving when you have the time. You arrive later, but you know the streets.

Reading slowly is not a virtue so much as a practice, like walking instead of driving when you have the time.

It also did not fix me. I still reach for the phone in the hall more often than I would like. What changed was smaller. I now know what it feels like to be reading properly, which means I notice when I am not.

If you want to try it, pick one book you already love. Put it somewhere you pass every day. Read less than you think you should, and write something in the margin every time. Come back to it next winter. It will have changed, and so will you, though probably not in the way you were hoping. Mine still has the bus ticket in it. I have not decided whether to start a fourth winter.