The alternative title for this was “Reading slow does not mean reading better”, but I don’t have anything against ‘slow readers’ (how do you even categorise reading speeds anyway?) and I thought that the title above was a bit more unwieldy but accurate.

The inspiration for this post came from this BookRiot post titled “Why I Stopped Doing the Goodreads Challenge at Midyear”. In it, the author writes:

“Given that someone read as many as 85 books over the course of six months, I wondered if they learned from the books they read at that speed. Did they enjoy what they read? I even came to the point where I considered that they may have skipped parts—cheating—just to show progress. But that’s a baseless accusation.”

This isn’t going to be a direct response to the post because the author did say that his hypothesis was a “baseless accusation” and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But I did want to talk about three things that I noticed from this paragraph, and which I’ve seen before:

1. Someone assumes thaet reading speed is measured in books per year.
2. The same someone assumes that they are the standard of a normal reading speed and if someone else read more books, they are probably ‘cheating’ in some way
3. Even if they aren’t cheating, they probably aren’t appreciating the book enough/won’t remember anything they read/the book is brainless.

I don’t know how common this is, but I did put it up on Dayre and someone else mentioned that a friend accused them of reading thin and ‘brainless’ books as their Goodreads challenge updates so there’s at least one person in the world who thinks like that.

Let’s talk about that:

Myth: Reading Speed is Measured in Books Per Year

Until I saw posts talking about fast and slow readers, I didn’t really think about my reading speed. I just read books and that was that. I didn’t even bother tracking how many books I read a year until I found Goodreads. So the idea of measuring reading speed, let alone thinking that your reading speed is the normal one, is a bit odd to me. Because I can think of one thing that would greatly influence how many books you finish in a year:

How much time you have to read

Do you use public transport or do you drive? Do you watch Netflix or do you read? (Confession: Ever since I borrowed the Great British Bake Off DVDs from my library, the number of books I’ve finished has almost ground to a halt)

Even if we have two people who can read the exact same number of pages per hour, the person who makes more time to read (even if it’s just 20 minutes a day) is going to finish many more books.

You could be a very fast reader and read one book a year because you find video games or movies more entertaining. Or you could be a very slow reader and finish 100 books a year because you can spend three or four hours a day reading.

Conclusion: The number of books that someone finishes per year isn’t a great indication of reading speed.

Myth: You set the standard for Average Reading Speed and anyone who reads more books that you is somehow ‘cheating’

Cheating: skipping paragraphs and chapters

This one annoys me because of its self-centeredness. Why do people assume that they are THE normal reader and everyone else either reads too little or too much?

To go a step further: why are you even assuming that people are shelving partially read books just to show off? I mean, the world isn’t nice and I’m sure there are a few people doing it, but overall I like to assume that everyone is tracking their reading for themselves, not others.

Personally, I don’t add 99% of the books I DNF or only read chapters from to Goodreads. I know there are people with a DNF shelf and that’s fine, but if I remember correctly, books aren’t added to your Goodreads challenge unless someone adds a read date (please correct me if I’m wrong). I assume that the idea people are adding unfinished books to their Goodreads Challenge comes from the DNF shelves, but again, why do we assume this?

I changed my mind. This assumption doesn’t annoy me because of its self-centeredness in assuming they are the standard, it annoys me because it assumes that everyone else who reads more books is somehow ‘bad’ and ‘cheating’.

Myth: If someone reads a lot of books in a year, they’re reading mindless/thin books

The implied genre snobbery in here is killing me. I was not told that you can only add ‘serious’ books that you’ve finished to your Goodreads challenge or that you are somehow not reading well if you read ‘mindless’ books.

Again, ‘mindless’ in quotations because when people talk about books being fluffy and brainless, they’re normally thinking of romance, chic-lit, or cozies (at least, in my experience. Correct me if I’m wrong). I think YA/MG may be in there, but I’m not too sure.

At any rate, it irks me that some books are seen as ‘lesser’ because for at least the romance and chic-lit genres, these books have mostly been written by and consumed by women and let’s not get me started on the way fiction for men and women tend to be perceived differently (hint: one is considered more serious than the other).

Tl;dr

To sum the whole thing up, I react negatively to people who try to compare reading speed, and my reaction goes through the roof if a comment about reading speed is followed by “oh, you must be reading easy books/thin books” because these comments are tied up in assumptions that look down others and certain genres. And it may be sexist.

I guess the one good thing is that I’ve seen/heard this mostly online, probably because I don’t really talk about how many books I read offline. I’m not too sure how I’d react if someone did tell me this in real life, but I suspect it will involve a long, angry rant.

P.s. I found this Mental Floss article after writing the post, but I like the speed reading test in it. The test involves you reading a passage and then answering three reading comprehension questions to see if you’ve understood it. If you have, it takes that reading speed and calculates how many books you’ll read in a year depending on how much time a day you spend reading – I think this is a much more sensible way to look at reading speed.