Quote:
Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan
Do I count the time I've been reading and I suppose there's the same time left?
|
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.
