Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
That never works -- or only for superficial readers.  As an example, here's my reading speed for one of the 7 books I'm currently reading, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (I've been unimpressed so far):
- 1.25 / 2%
- 0.5 / 4%
- 0.5 / 6%
- 1 / 3%
- 0.5 / 6%
- 0.75 / 7%
- 0.5 / 4%
- 0.5 / 10%
Each line represents another day of reading that book. The percentage shows my reading speed, in percentages per hour. (This particular book is 107,000 words long, which might be around 330 pages on paper.) The earliest data is at the bottom.
As can be seen, my reading speed for this book varies wildly, between 10% per hour and 2% per hour. Whenever I slow down in a book, it's typically a sign that the book is getting better -- that I annotate it more while reading it, or think about it more as I'm reading it. And how could you know in advance how good or bad the rest of the book you're reading, is going to be?  You can never know that in advance. Therefore, predicting your reading speed on the basis of your reading speed so far, is always extremely unreliable, and can always only be an extremely crude guesstimate. Unless you're a superficial reader  -- which, of course, is exactly what our schools and universities typically teach young people to be.  |
Well despite my avatar I'm far from young, but maybe I'm just one of those dreaded superficial readers.
I usually have a pretty good idea of whether my book is a long one or a short one from the outset, and if I'm not sure, I can tell by how quickly or slowly that percentage moves along. I never annotate my books (I read for pleasure and it's a bit like the math thing - I just want to read, not take notes like I had to
waaay back in college). I guess I can see your point, kind of, but we're clearly approaching our reading enjoyment from two completely different directions.
But hey, I'm all for as many choices as possible, so it'd be nice to have both options to make everyone happy.