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Speed reading, or ... stop and dream

I was intrigue - and felt challeged - by an email from mas Moko in a mailing list. In this particular email he said that he tried to read two books a day. I thought I give it a try. The result, I failed.

My biggest problem is that I tend to stop and think, or dream, about the point in the paragraph(s) I was reading. I'll give you an example. Currently I am reading "Never Ending Journey," a biography about pak Buntoro who happens to be a friend of mine. In the book there is a story in which he made plans about his company. I stopped and thought, "You know, I could do that." And then ... I am 'dreaming' about what I have to do, what things I should write to the guys in the company, or dreaming about (technology) roadmap, and so on. This dreaming process may take a few seconds - then continue reading the book - or may take longer.

In other cases, reading certain things remind me of my TO-DO list. I just fell I have to do it right away. I then do whatever I remembered to do. (I am doing a lot of context switching. I heard it somewhere that this is not good.) In computer term, it's like a non-maskable interrupt (NMI). So, again, I stop reading the book. As a result, my things-to-read keeps on piling ... and piling ... and piling. (I should take a picture of my things-to-read stacks.)

I dream too much!

What's your (reading) habbit?

Comments

Ikhlasul Amal said…
I am agree with you. I am ever curious to some peoples who told me how to do speed reading, get some important points, and reach some conclusions about the topics. It is very hard for me to do so. I prefer to have a dream, to imagine "ngalor-ngidul" ("north-south", unclear direction) along with reading. And this takes longer time to complete all pages. In some paragraphs, they are so fascinated that I'd like to stop and "melamun".
3:39 PM
Anonymous said…
2 books a day, wow! Well, how many pages in one book?
Certainly there are just too many knowledge in the world
to be absorbed by the human brains and we have only 24 hours a day. So we have to choose the one that we think
is the most important and interesting.
But yes, I agree, it would be fun to be able to read 2 books a day -- check out the Guiness Record of speed reading and the #1 Amazon.com reviewer, both of them are speed reader. Still I think it's better to understand the book deeply rather than shallowly if you read too fast. I myself usually read one book a month.
7:35 AM
Budi Rahardjo said…
I do read quite fast, though. It takes two or three days for me to read a novel. For example, I just finished reading Dan Brown's Deception Point. I think, I took me three days to read it.

But, you are right that for textbook-type book, I takes me longer to read (and even longer to understand the content, of course).
11:21 AM
za said…
I am trying to like read books. Although i feel that i am too late, starting to love books. I prefer to read 'social' books rather than text books (well, anyhow that's a must for me in order to understand the lecture). I don't know why, i found that reading text books is kinda boring.

Indonesian people are not having good habit to read books. My opinion is because our society choose to watch television rather than spend time reading books. Furthermore, our society watch the televison show is only about gossip show, sinetron, and other uneducated-show.
2:12 AM
Sumodirjo said…
Whadowww! I have to post my Comment in english. I also interested in speed reading, there are a lot of books sleeping on my bedroom. have no time to read them all. BTW, may I photo copy your foreign books, like "the nudist and the late shift", etc. But I'm located in Semarang.
11:13 AM
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