Too Fast For Fiction

When I was in high school my father, in an effort to improve my grades and possibly improve upon his own intellect, purchased a speed reading course. This was before the internet took over everything, so it must have come out of the back of a magazine. The tapes came in a large, black case, with a strange looking pair of men on the back cover. It was Howard Stephen Berg’s “Mega Speed Reading”, and the photos were of Berg and Kevin Trudeau, the Penn to Berg’s Teller, if I may sully the names of my favorite magicians by making such a comparison.

If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, you’ve seen Trudeau playing the part of a budget Larry King on an infomercial set made out to look like an actual news program. I have insomnia, hence I’ve seen far too much of Kevin Trudeau. One commercial that comes to mind is a colon cleansing program, pushed by a man with the dubious name of Klee Irwin and a moustache that reminds me of when my daughter eats pudding.

Much of the course consisted of Berg boasting about his abilities, such as reading Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” in about three minutes and passing a test on Stern’s radio show. The basic method was sweeping your hands over the text and skimming, identifying important words, so on and so forth. The ink from some books would build-up on your hands, which brings to mind the song “Informer” by Snow and (yes, I looked it up) MC Shan:

Take me to the station, black up my hands
Trail me down 'cause I'm hanging with the Snowman

I handled the method alright, and read a few books using it, but it felt like sticking a beautiful dinner into a blender, hitting chop, and then sucking the juice with a straw. For example: the following quote from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Those three sentences consist of 51 words. Berg claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute, or about 416 words a second. That means that someone with Berg’s amazing ability would suck down that simile, given in a dialect, in a tenth of a second.

I love reading, and I wish I could do more of it. I used to spend entire days at the library or on a sunny lawn just plowing through hundreds of pages a day, getting pale when I was inside and red-skinned when I was out. Right now I’m blazing through John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down”, a rich and moving fable from World War Two that was actually used as propaganda for the Allies, passed among the resistance, and banned by the Axis (the punishment for possessing a copy in Italy was death). Blazing for me is the expectation that I’ll be finishing it tonight, or about two days after buying it at the wonderful Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.

If I was Berg, however, I’d be done with it in roughly a minute, minute and a half (it’s short, about 110 pages). I have a wife and kid and more kids on the way, a garden and writing and a day job, so my reading time is little now, but you know what? The minute or two or even three (or ten, if it’s Pynchon or certain Faulkner texts) it takes me to get through the back of one sheet and the front of another is a wonderful time, and I feel no desire to flap through it like I’m yanking sheets of toilet paper from a stubborn roll. Some things in life shouldn’t be galloped through to the end, and I’d like to think that fiction is one of them.

(Although I’d like to have all politicians trained to speed read. Then, maybe, if they actually read the laws they pass, they might not do so.)

Non sequitur: How my car's front passenger seat looks right now: