The Joys of Slow Reading

An Embarrassingly Obvious Realization

I have always been a fast reader. For a long time I thought this was one of my greatest strengths, and it is still incredibly handy for work. Oftentimes, the life of an “educational YouTuber” (as I call myself with the appropriate level of shame), is a matter of reading dozens of papers, books, and articles, in the hope that one or two of them will ultimately be used in whatever video you are researching. Sometimes none are, or they are only mentioned in passing. Nonetheless, this process is both unavoidable and the best part of the job. When I started my channel, it was partly because I desperately wanted to spend my time learning things, and realized this could only happen if I found some way to make money off of teaching whatever I had learnt. That’s one reason my channel is called “Unsolicited Advice” - to recognize that no one has requested any of this information. It is just me talking about whatever I happened to find interesting.

However, more recently I realized something: reading is not relaxing for me anymore. For a long time, reading was something that I did for fun, or to unwind. I enjoyed getting back from my previous job (which, admittedly, I hated), and cracking open a book or going through one of the many papers in my “to read” folder. It felt like an escape from reality, and I was not just mining them for information, but sounding them out in my head. In some ways this was deeply inefficient, and yet it was also really quite fun. It did not seem like work, but play.

Of course, now things are a little bit different. I am fortunate enough to do this as my job now, and that comes with certain pressures. I have a work schedule that I stick to relatively religiously. I have deadlines (though, admittedly, self-imposed ones) that I am loathe to move because they each have a knock-on effect. I still absolutely love what I do, but I’ve also encountered the same dilemma faced by anyone whose work and passion coincide: how do I recapture that sense of free play that I felt when I was merely doing this for me?

This is an ongoing project of mine. These blog posts are part of it. Since my substack makes no money, I can put things out just for the joy of writing. They are also much lower stakes. Making a YouTube video takes time. The research and writing takes tens of hours, and filming takes another few as well (though, mercifully, my wonderful video editor has taken that off my hands). With these posts, things are different. I just write one when I have something to say, spend a couple of hours writing it, and splurge it out into the world. It really has recaptured the low pressure fun of writing.

Reading was more difficult, and for a long time I could not figure out why. I would read things totally unrelated to work, and yet still not quite find that peaceful frame of mind that used to come so naturally to me with a book between my hands. But all of a sudden it became clear: I was still reading the book as if it was for research, rather than pleasure. I was getting through it at a breakneck pace, combing it for insights and information, and subtly critiquing each of its philosophical points in my head. This is a very helpful way to read, and is certainly more focused than many other approaches to reading. But it is in no sense “calm”. If I tune into my internal monologue, it is a busy collection of chatterers. There is the one reading the book, the one criticizing it as I go, the one raising questions, the one wondering if I could make this into a video. This cacophony of internal noise is pretty active, but far from relaxed.

The book that made me realize this was Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. I first read this a while ago, and I have recently picked it up again with the intention of finally experiencing the whole of In Search of Lost Time. This is, to put it lightly, not a book you can read in an active frame of mind. The sentences run on to encompass whole paragraphs (something Proust himself seemed to dislike about his writing), and the pace of the story is so unrelentingly slow that there is almost no room left for chattering. The sentence structures were so odd, and the trains of thought so meandering, that it gradually slowed down my pace of reading. But strangely, as soon as this happened, I found myself relaxing. It was almost like bits of my mind were going to sleep. I had given up on conscious analysis or critique or philosophical mining, and only one voice remained. The voice slowly, almost sleepily, reading the words on the page.

I don’t quite know how to describe this feeling, and perhaps it is something that comes easily to others, but if I had to put it into words, I would say it was “reading quietly”. It was similar to listening to a slower piece of music, after hours and hours of 120bpm.

I am writing this because I want to heartily recommend this exercise to anyone who does read a lot for work. Even if you enjoy that work, I imagine that you will have got into a mental habit of prioritizing speed, efficiency, and informational processing over simple enjoyment, perhaps without even realizing it. This is what I do to switch my reading modes:

1. I recognize that I am in “work reading mode” and so when I first open the page, I will be bombarded with all kinds of active thoughts.

2. I consciously sound out the words in my head comically slowly. I try to savor each one in a luxurious kind of way

3. I try to maintain this pace of reading, not letting myself speed up

4. I periodically check whether I have sped up (I almost always have), at which point I go back to step 2 and repeat.

If you do this, you will certainly read a lot more slowly. It is, by its nature, inefficient, and yet that is precisely why I want to recommend it. In the information economy, it is hard not to see books as simply containing ‘stuff’, and that reading is simply the process of obtaining that stuff. As a Cambridge professor once said about his research reading: “You must not read books, you must raid them!”. But this can make reading simply a means to an end, and in doing so rob us of the simple, slightly pretentious, and eminently relaxing joy of reading itself.

And if you think all of this sounds like a needlessly tortured way to say “let your reading be fun again” you are probably right.