The Gospel Coalition

As I said in my last post, I have no real desire to speed-read, especially after dedicating a bit of time to learning how. But reading the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading did give me a few things to chew on. One of them was this list of three misconceptions about reading.

The first misconception is that you are supposed to read everything the same way, word by word. You feel that no matter the genre, you are supposed to read all text the same way. You start at the beginning, read through the middle, and end up at the end. This is a bad habit and a pretty dumb one under certain circumstances. Depending on your purpose for reading there may be good reason to skip through a book, to read bits here and bits there, to slow down or to speed up.

The second misconception is that if you read using a once-through, beginning-to-end approach to reading, you ought to be able to understand what you have read. Over time you have learned that this is not the case, that there are times where you need to read a certain passage or even a whole book repeatedly in order to absorb it. But this is probably something you have had to learn on your own, not something you were taught and not something you were taught to deal with. Most of us still feel a bit dumb if we are unable to understand a book or a section within a book after a single pass.

The third misconception is that after that single read you should not only understand the text but also remember what was important in it. The fact is, though, that in most cases not all text is equal and you do not need to remember everything you read. The important thing is to learn what matters and what does not. It is just as important to filter the fluff as it is to file away what really matters.

All of this means that you need to know your purpose in reading before you start. There is a difference between reading the Bible and reading the latest celebrity memoir. There is a difference between reading a historic biography of an important figure and reading that same celebrity memoir. As Kump says, “A reading method should serve whatever purpose you have for the reading material.”

When it comes to this project, I will be reading for comprehension but generally not for long-term retention. Whether I can remember the details of many of these books ten years from now is not the purpose. Instead, the purpose is to read widely and to read quickly, attempting to gather information, to coordinate that information and to draw out principles. Thus I will not be reading these books as I might read a commentary or a theological treatise. Having said that, I also will not be reading as I might read a mindless novel. I do want to understand what I read and I do want to make sure that I do have a sense of what I’ve read. Somewhere in there is the sweet spot!