It's a poll! For you!

[agentotter]

Okay, it's not really a poll. Well, it's not a poll with tickys. I know, I'm sorry, I miss the tickys too, but I couldn't come up with enough ticky-answers to contain the possible width and breadth of your replies, so this is more of one of those, "here is my question, plz discuss" polls.

I was just kind of curious how fast all of you people read, and what your personal reading experience is. I, for instance, am unable to read anything rapidly. I read at the same pace I would if I were reading aloud, or rather as if someone were reading aloud to me. If I'm reading something where the author's voice is familiar, like the Barack Obama book I'm reading right now, or where the characters' voices are familiar, like an SG-1 tie-in novel or something, I "hear" the person's voice as I'm reading. So basically my reading experience is a full-on auditory hallucination, which is always fun, but it's also a little frustrating because it takes me ten million years to finish reading a book, and if I try to read faster, I don't retain any information and the narration in my head sounds like... well, it sort of sounds like David Hewlett talking about black holes.

How about you? Do you read fast? Slow? Only if there is gay porn? TELL ME. I MUST KNOW.

In other news, I think it's safe to say that it's now officially summer. You know how I know? Because I forgot my sunscreen and parts of me are now the kind of alarming and aggressive pink that you usually only find on lawn flamingos.

Comments

[j00j]

Um, I read a lot faster than I would read aloud (assuming I'm reading in English-- my reading speed in German is much closer to that of reading aloud). How fast I can read depends on what I am reading. I mean, if it's a YA novel or something else lighter it goes very fast. If it's, say, Shakespeare, that'll be a little slower (especially if I want to think about the language and, you know, properly appreciate all the dirty jokes). If it's somebody like Hegel, that is going to go real slow and I'll probably have to reread things to fully understand and therefore retain the material. But with average English content I can recognize individual words or small groups of words pretty much instantly. To put this into perspective-- If I'm watching a subtitled movie with a group of people, I'll often laugh at the jokes before most others do because I've read them faster. I'm not the fastest reader I know, but I'm pretty fast.