Home For Fiction – Blog

I am what you would call a fast reader. However, the designation is a bit misleading. I am a fast reader if the book is interesting, and a slow reader when it’s not. I’ve finished 900-page books in two days, but I can spend months on something boring. Still, sometimes – boring or not – you must read a book as soon as possible. A student of mine once asked me for tips on how to read faster. I gave her a simple answer: just read more. Today’s article will expand on that short but accurate piece of advice.

I will divide my tips in nonfiction and fiction, as the dynamics are a bit different. But you should read both sections, as the lessons from the one can be partly applicable to the other one as well.

How to Read Faster: Non-Fiction

Most people want to know how to read faster for a simple, practical reason: they need to. In other words, they’re often students who need to read a book for an assignment. Or perhaps they might be writing a Master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation and need to go through a large number of books to find some specific information.

If you took a look at my doctoral dissertation (available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press), you would see over 200 bibliographical entries. And there are at least another 100 that didn’t make the final cut. The more you read, the faster you read. You have to.

Let’s face it, knowledge is great and important, but a certain degree of balancing is required. In other words, when you’re looking at thirty or forty books, you need to at least find out which ones you should read. Reading a 300-page book only to discover it didn’t contain what you needed is thoroughly frustrating.

Structural Reading: Building Foundations

The key to reading faster is to read structurally. What this means is, you should start from the information that is readily available, for instance, the index or the table of contents. It takes seconds or minutes at most. If applicable, note down the pages that could be of particular interest.

The next step is to read the introduction. Academic books usually contain a neat synopsis of their contents in the introductory part. It is often quite explicit, in the sense that the author might specifically list each section or chapter and what s/he will analyze there.

Scanning Text…

Entering the main text you should already have a rough idea of what it contains. Now comes the part where you have a chance to speed things up a bit. Based on what you saw in the table or contents and/or introduction, you can choose to assign a lower priority to certain sections. How do you read a “lower-priority” section? You… don’t. You scan it!

Go down the text, paragraph by paragraph, trying to simply catch an interesting keyword or concept related to what you’re looking for. If it’s a low-priority section, there shouldn’t be many of those. Remember what I said earlier: if you want to learn how to read faster, you must learn to read structurally. This is the case at all levels of text.

In other words, you can usually quickly tell what a chunk of text is about at the chapter- section- paragraph- and even sentence level. Scan through a paragraph, knowing that its meaning is usually revealed in the first couple of sentences. The last couple are also a good place to take a look. Do the same as you move further down the text.

…And Reading Text

Conversely, when you’re going through a “high-priority” chapter or section, this is were you should pay more attention. Almost certainly, the reason you needed to read the book lies here somewhere. Helped by the index and/or table of contents, you shouldn’t have much trouble locating it.

How to Read Faster: Fiction

Generally speaking, one shouldn’t feel the need to read fiction feeling time constraints. One obvious exception is if you need to read a book for some school or university assignment. The procedure is not dissimilar to the one I described above, about non-fiction, with some caveats:

• unlike non-fiction, fiction books don’t include an index or table of contents
• there is no introduction where the author offers you a synopsis of the contents
• the structure of the text is, generally speaking, not linear.

What these mean is that your job is a bit harder. You can’t assign priorities to certain parts of the text, so you basically have to read it through.

So, how can you read fiction faster?

Again, assuming that you just need to, follow the same scanning technique as I described above, for non-fiction books. One area you can pay attention to is first-hand information – in other words: dialogue between characters. You can skim through lengthy descriptions. Not knowing whether a wall was burgundy red or the ivy growing on it was rustling isn’t detrimental to your knowledge of the book. Focus on the beginning and end of paragraphs and chapters.

The dynamics do depend a bit on the genre, but these tips should allow you to read faster, in terms of obtaining information quicker. However, do keep in mind that – especially for fiction – the magic of reading lies in proceeding according to your own pace.