For years, my bookcase was filled with books I’d never finished reading, a testament to my truly horrendous ‘books I want to read’ to ‘books I actually read’ ratio.
The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have enough time to read. I had plenty of time to scroll on Tiktok and Instagram, after all.
No, the real problem was that I had fallen out of practice with reading deeply – the act of focusing, blocking out all other distractions, and actively reading.
Reading is a muscle that weakens over time through a lack of exercise.
We all know how to read, but most of us choose not to work this muscle when we don’t need to.
To get back into reading, I built a two-step reading and reflection practice that has helped me immensely with improving my reading speed and retention.
Have you ever listened to a podcast while commuting to work, or running on the treadmill?
Podcasts have become one of the most popular ways we now consume media, and for good reason. Listening to someone talk is effortless – it’s easy to follow, and listening doesn’t require a lot of effort, and we can often multitask while listening.
For all these reasons, audiobooks are also on the rise.
But listening to an audiobook by itself won’t improve your reading. It also won’t improve how much you retain from the book – after all, consuming something as passively as just listening makes it even easier for your mind to drift off, and for you to forget the details.
To truly help you focus on reading, listen to the audiobook while reading the book.
This one practice has completely transformed my ability to read. Hearing someone else verbalize the words you are reading makes it so much easier to focus on the words.
What’s more, audiobooks are often recorded with professional voice actors, who can bring the words we read to life. A good voice actor will create different ‘voices’ for certain characters, giving them different accents or ways of speaking to bring out the emotions and personalities the authors had intended to give their characters.
One of the best audiobooks I have ever listened to is Tolstoy’s War and Peace, narrated by the actress Thandiwe Newton, who played Maeve in Westworld.
Newton not only has the most incredible voice, she’s also talented with putting on accents and creating unique voices for characters of different ages, backgrounds and genders. She also had no trouble reading the French passages dotted all across the novel, which only added to the beauty of Tolstoy’s writing.
Listening to Newton narrate War and Peace brought Tolstoy’s masterpiece to life, and made it far, far easier for me to follow the words of a very dense book.
Start reading a book by listening and reading at the same time, and allow an experienced narrator to bring you into the book.
Once you’ve gotten more invested into the story, you may find that you don’t need an external narrator. You would rather just read the book yourself and speed through the more riveting, fast-paced sections.
But starting a book and getting past the initial unfamiliarity of the protagonist, the characters and settings is the hardest part. In these moments, it can be incredibly helpful to introduce a narrator to get us more absorbed into the book. And the more deeply we can embed ourselves into the story, the more we can get out of the book.
Once you’re comfortable with reading and listening together, steadily increase the speed of your audiobook to match your reading speed.
You’ll find that your reading speed is naturally faster than the narrating speed.
Audiobooks are recorded at a pace that is slower than our regular talking speed. For this reason, I often start listening to an audiobook at a leisurely 1.3x speed, slow enough to ensure that I don’t miss any crucial details that are often introduced in the book’s exposition, but fast enough that I don’t feel as if I’m reading at an excruciating pace.
Once I’m comfortable and I’ve gotten into a rhythm, I’ll increase my speed to 2 or 2.5x speed.
Doing this once I’m already absorbed into the book means that I’m not pushing myself beyond my natural reading pace.
Listening at a comparable speed to my natural reading speed does one crucial job: it helps me maintain my top reading speed for a longer period of time.
The truth is, no one reads at one constant speed.
We all naturally read faster when we’re at a part of the book we’re super interested in, and we read much slower when it comes to dense paragraphs.
Reading with an audiobook means that I can fix a speed to the narration for parts of the book that are harder to read, so I’m not suddenly slowing down and losing focus once I get to these sections.
Crucially, it prevents me from losing momentum when I reach the more tedious sections of the book – I can instead push through them by assigning a constant narration speed.
Oftentimes, I will drop the narration speed down to somewhere around 1.5x, because I also don’t want to simply churn through these harder sections without properly reading them.
But the benefit of being able to change to a certain listening speed while reading is that it forces that speed to stay constant – it means your reading speed can’t drop any lower than what this point is.
Then, once you’re through with these sections, you can always pump your narration speed back up again, so you’re once again matching your natural reading speed.
Aligning your audiobook speed with your reading speed is a sure-fire way to encourage yourself to read at the best pace you possibly can.
A good reading practice is nothing without a good reflection practice to supplement it.
Afterall, reading fast is not really the end goal here – it’s to read fast and retain more of what you read. This is all about engaging in active reading – not so different to the practice of active listening.
Active reading involves reading not just with our eyes (and ears), but reading with our minds at play.
To read actively is to consider what the author is trying to communicate to us through their book, and how we are responding to it.
If it’s a non-fiction book, consider asking yourself the following questions as you read:
If you’re reading a fiction book, ask yourself these questions as you read:
Read with the intention of forming your own independent opinion on the book.
How often have you read a book, only to realize when someone asks you what you liked or disliked about it, you have no idea how to respond?
This happens to all of us, and it’s what happens when we read with indifference. We simply accept the story being told to us without truly thinking about what deeper narratives it is trying to convey, and how we feel about these narratives.
Train your reading skills by getting into the habit of reading with a notebook next to you.
At the end of each reading session, write down some thoughts on what you’ve learnt or what you like or dislike, about the book you’re reading.
Maybe it’s simply to complain about the dullness or lack of relatability of your protagonist. If that’s the case, what is it that actually makes them boring, unrelatable, or unlikeable?
Maybe you’re reading a bestselling YA novel that doesn’t have heaps of depth.
Ask yourself what it is about this book that keeps drawing you in.
I have a journal dedicated to writing down my reflections on the books I am reading.
Writing by hand engages a different part of the brain, a part that isn’t utilized when we’re texting or typing.
It’s for this reason that brainstorming is often best done by writing ideas quickly on a physical surface – this action triggers new thoughts and ideas that might not otherwise come to us.
Similarly, capturing your thoughts on paper when they are still fresh, without thinking too much about how to phrase or structure them, can also trigger new thoughts and reflections.
I’ve also found that writing down the key takeaways from the book I’ve just read also helps me remember them better. It forces me to think over what I’ve just read, and to explain them in my own words.
If writing freely doesn’t come to you naturally, try writing a book review instead.
Websites like Goodreads feature books that are reviewed by millions of readers all around the world.
If you’re lost on where to start, reading reviews that other readers have left on Goodreads could give you inspiration on what you could write about.
Reflection also doesn’t have to be written: it could be verbal.
Try to explain your thoughts, or what you’ve learnt from the book, to a friend.
This is essentially the purpose of book clubs – avid book readers come together regularly to share their thoughts on the book they’re reading.
But you don’t have to join a book club to talk about a book.
Consider discussing the book with someone who has already read it – ask them what they thought, then share your own thoughts with them.
Or alternatively, find someone who isn’t much of a reader but is happy to hear you talk about the ideas of a certain book. This may spark new perspectives and enrich your reading, even more than talking to someone who already knows the book.
Sometimes, the best way to retain information is by teaching it to someone else.
For example, my husband is a numbers guy – the last book he remembers reading is a finance textbook.
He’s not interested in ever reading Anna Karenina, so I was free to unload the book’s entire plot on him the minute I had finished reading Tolstoy’s other literary masterpiece. He actually appreciated me sharing with him what I loved and hated about the book, and the people who various characters in the book reminded me of.
He recognized that I was passing on some of the book’s wisdom to him, and helping him understand a literary world he would never enter. In return, I was also strengthening my understanding of the book.
Reading fast and actively is not a skill that most of us are born with – it’s something that comes with practice.
The reading and reflection practice I have shared is one that has worked wonders for me, as it has helped to eliminate my distractions and challenged me to think more deeply while reading.
This practice might not work for you, and that’s okay. My learning style might be different to yours.
But I encourage you to challenge yourself to consider what’s truly holding you back from reading, and to design your own practice that can help address those obstacles.