On 09/19/2010 10:32 PM, John Bokma wrote:
AK<andrei....@gmail.com>  writes:

On 09/19/2010 07:18 PM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
AK wrote:

Afaik the idea is that you can read a novel at the speed of half a page
a second or so and understand it to the same extent as people who'd read
at a normal rate.

I've never understood why anyone would *want* to read a
novel that fast, though. For me at least, reading a novel
is something done for pleasure, so reading it at ten times
normal speed would waste 90% of the benefit.


One definite advantage would be that if, say, it takes you 70 pages of a
given novel to figure out whether you like it enough to continue, you'd
want to read those pages in 2 minutes rather than an hour.

Heh, to me speed reading those 70 pages in a very short while,
concluding that it's a good book, and start over again would be quite
the spoiler. Do you fast forward movies as well?

I honestly doubt it would be a spoiler if it's a good book. Generally I
find that poor books rely on twists and turns while better ones rely on
the fabric of story-telling. Aside from that, though, it's a very
interesting question - I'll try to think of good books and see if they'd
be spoiled by peeking in the first 70 pages.. Starting with children's
books, Peter Pan and Wind in the Willows, I think, would not be. Don
quixote would not be. Crime and punishment - maybe if you get as far as
the murder? Same author's the Devils, I would say you can read the last
70 pages and it'd be just as good :). -ak
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