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Speed Reading

A long time ago, I remarked that my sister thinks I read very quickly. It's one of those things that I've apparently done for a very long time, but I've never really spent much time thinking about it. It's not like it's ever made much of a difference one way or the other. Until recently, that is.

A shorter time ago, my brother and sister got me some comic books for my birthday. Well, to be precise, they got me the comic books a few days before my birthday, so I was pleasantly surprised. What's more, they'd actually gone back to a Secret Santa wish list from years past to figure out which ones I thought would be interesting (clever of them, I must say), so I was even more pleasantly surprised. In fact, I was so pleased by the gift, that I was reading them within the hour. Now, just to give you an idea of how much there was to read, one of these was an inches-thick anthology. It was easily several hundred pages long. Even if you account for the fact that there's a bunch of art that takes up space in those pages, that's still not a trivial amount of reading. I spent a couple of hours reading, and I had only finished about a third of the novel.

Still, I enjoyed the material enough that I kept reading in the next couple of days before I went to bed. By the end of the third day, though, I was finished. I really enjoyed the whole thing, so I sent a quick text message to them both saying it was an awesome gift. My sister's response, however, was, "already? What the hell? That was supposed to last you until your birthday." Hm, hadn't considered that. To make matters even more amusing, she left me a Facebook message on my birthday that said, "happy birthday reading, jerk."

An even shorter time ago, though, I was waiting to catch a flight with a friend. We had about an hour before the flight was supposed to board, but we were worried that the flight was going to be delayed. Given all of that, I pulled out the book I had brought with me, "Ender's Game" (if you're interested, see the wikipedia article, but it HAS SPOILERS). It's not the longest book, but it is quite possibly my favorite book. I've already read it several times, and I have no doubt that I'll read it again. Partially because I like the book so much, I couldn't put the book down, so by the time the flight boarded, I was done with three-fourths of the book.

I barely noticed, but my friend looked over and said, "holy crap! How fast do you read?" He then started trying to guess how many words per minute I read (his guess was 200+ but I have no idea what that means). It became a topic of conversation for the next five minutes or so, but it made me chuckle even more given what my sister told me.

All in all, it's not a bad skill to have. Still, I may have to read a little bit slower so people stop giving me a hard time about it.

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