Audiobooks taught me otherwise. Even though the narrator tends to read out loud consistently more slowly than an average person reading silently, I found I'd get through audiobooks much more quickly than paper books. Why?
I knew it had to do with focus. I tend to stop and think while I read. Maybe I want to hustle, and think I should, and even feel guilty, but something sparks a train of thought, and I follow that around, and reflect and connect things before remembering that I'm reading. This doesn't happen sometimes. It happens constantly. It's a lot of why I have trouble getting through books. My first audiobook showed me that it was not reading speed or even emotional ease with lifting words from lettered pages that would get me through more books. It was simply momentum. An audiobook provides momentum. It's like going to a museum with a friend who has a small child. If you stop at particular paintings or sculptures for long, you will get left behind. Then they will either forget all about you forever, or they will come back looking for you, complaining that they just spent five minutes trying to find you.
In a museum, there is little or nothing difficult about walking and seeing works of art go by as you walk. What's difficult is knowing that you have so much more to see and understand, and you can only get a fraction of it, and it's on you to grasp for that fraction in a short time.
Most writers write somewhere between 1 and 5 pages a day. If you ever feel that you're reading so slowly that you must be stupid, remember that the page you're kicking yourself for not finishing in 1 minute, or 2 minutes, or even 10 minutes may have been that author's entire day of work when it was written.
(It took me about 15 minutes to write and edit the above. So please don't spend any longer than that on it!)
