Dispatch 002: Speed Reading is Not a Virtue

It was January 3rd. Like any other wintry Saturday afternoon, I was scrolling while my daughter napped. And I found myself stopping at a post, one that struck me. Not because it was particularly arresting or amusing, but because it felt…off. Half boast, half justification. Proud, but with pre-emptive defending. A boxer squaring up in an empty ring.

Three days. Seven books. Come at me, haters. 

More or less.

I checked the comments, mentally preparing popcorn, a Roman in an internet coliseum, expecting to see our bookish gladiator torn limb from limb by faceless lions.

But that was not the case. The coliseum in my mind dissolved into a group therapy room, chairs encircling our poster, responses all a variation on a theme: you’re doing great, sweetie, and anyone who disagrees is simply jealous.

What did they mean by jealousy? As in, this person’s reading throughput could be something people might covet?

Why?

Before I could find myself neck deep in the reading speed discourse, my daughter required my attention. But the question has stuck with me all month: why would someone be jealous of someone else posting about reading seven books in 72 hours?

So I set out to answer the question.

First, I wanted to set the stage. I needed to understand more about reading: where it came from, so I can better understand where we are now. Which is an amusing sentence to type, as someone who has been reading since before I could remember (according to my mom, take it up with her), knowing now that I’ve never really considered the history of reading for pleasure until I found myself bewildered by a social media post.

I’ll save you the furtive googling and YouTube video essays and string together what I’ve gathered here for us all, so we’re all on the same page. (God, I can’t resist a pun.) 

Humans have been writing for thousands of years. Most of us know this. Visually communicating verbal information started out in the form of recording transactions, and was largely pictorial representations of the object being referenced, rather than what we now consider words. Millennia passed, and around 2600 BCE, cuneiform writing was used to note laws and the doings of kings. In 2300 BCE, history notes an Akkadian High Priestess, Enheduanna, as the first known author to sign her work, temple hymns. This is also the first time history sees the “dear reader” address, acknowledging the two-way intertemporal relationship between writer and reader.

Okay, cool, but when did humanity start hallucinating wildly while looking at ink on dead trees for fun?

The development of reading for pleasure, as far as is understood in the Western world, really took off following the 1688 revolution. Before 1688, in Britain, material could not be published or disseminated without explicit government approval. Once that law lapsed, mass publication exploded. A couple of generations later, the Industrial Revolution happened.

Suddenly, certain economic and social classes had much more free time than they did before. Reading followed.

And so it went, as time marched on, as education became a requirement for contributing economically, reading for pleasure expanded to the masses. Certain masses, anyway. Enslaved peoples and, in some societies, any woman, have had literacy withheld from them, often violently. There are stories in history of enslaved people, colonized people, and women risking their lives to learn how to read. 

Throughout history, reading has never been treated as just a hobby. It has always been a lifeline. It has been, is, the bedrock of what we are.

In all of my reading of this history, I still hadn’t seen the origin of this idea that reading throughput was something to covet. In fact, I hadn’t seen any reference to tracking the quantity of books read at all, let alone doing so at any particular pace.

In fact, I saw mostly references to the opposite. Commonplace books, around since antiquity, originated to capture a reader’s interactions with ideas, quotes, themes, and wisdom they encountered in their daily lives. The goal, it seemed, was to respond to the text. You can see this in the practice of readers leaving doodles and notes in the margins of texts, collectively called marginalia.

Reading, for most of its existence, has encouraged those who engage in it to take their time. To consider what is being said. 

To think, to feel.

To respond.

And, if a writer is lucky, to be changed.

Dear reader, these words are for you, after all. Each one.

But still, I couldn’t find a record of reading speed as an enviable metric. 

This had to be a recent development, I guess.

I started thinking back to my own lived experience as a lifelong reader. Immediately, I recalled one of my seventh-grade triumphs: having the most Accelerated Reader points in my entire school. I got a trophy at the end-of-year awards ceremony for that one. A trophy. I was onto something.

So I looked into Accelerated Reader. It’s educational software that’s intended to measure how well a student retains read information, essentially determining whether a student actually read the book they said they did, via quizzes taken after reading. I remembered the experience, including being told by a nice woman in the guidance counselor’s office that the special test I took meant I should try reading third-, fourth-, or even fifth-grade books, not just the second-grade level, which was the grade I was in at the time.

I remember enjoying getting points, it felt like a fun game that came with reading, but it didn’t gamify the quantity of reading itself: longer books, harder books, were worth more points. You wouldn’t get a trophy for simply reading eighty-seven Little Golden Books.

Around this era, too, were programs like the Pizza Hut BookIt! program that incentivized reading for children by offering a personal pan pizza in exchange for reading a set quantity of books in a certain timeframe. In fact, this appears to be the emergence of the formalized, externalized incentive to read. Quantifying books read as a means to a cheesy end.

Ah, capitalism. There you are. I was wondering when you’d show up. 

The program did not appreciably instill a love for reading in generations of American children. We’ve all seen the headlines. In 2025, only 16% of all Americans bothered to read anything for pleasure. The program did, however, seem to instill a devotion to pizza, and encouraged millions of children who are now adults, that reading as a throughput metric was not only worth doing but worth advertising to others.

Enter Goodreads. 

In 2013, when the former internet bookstore, now retail behemoth, Amazon, purchased bookish social media platform Goodreads, it debuted its annual reading challenge, encouraging users to commit to reading a certain quantity of books during a calendar year.

And, as humans trained in the AR/Book-It methodology, it became a competition overnight. The rewards weren’t trophies or pizzas, but something intangible. Something we might make posts about online, perhaps.

Bragging rights.

What is there to brag about, though? Quantity. Right. And, by extension, since books are discrete units no matter what the page count is, what pumps those numbers up?

Short books. Simple prose. Genre fiction at the exclusion of literary works. Constant novelty, compelling one to turn page after page after page. Learning the maximum speed an audiobook player can go.

Conversely, what keeps those numbers down?

Difficult work. Dense prose. Ambiguous plots that demand the reader stay with the author. Re-reading ends up in the crosshairs because does it “count” if you’ve read it before? 

Count toward what?! I scream to myself.

All of this focus on constantly finishing books costs us, too. How many posts have we seen recommending short books to meet your quota? I mean, meet your goal? How many posts have we seen of readers discussing falling behind, wringing their hands like they’re in danger of missing a deadline at work?

How many readers DNF a book, promising to return later, because reading it is “taking too much time?”

Reading quickly becomes a shield against these feelings. 

Against the possibility that, perhaps, reading for quantity isn’t the point. 

That, if we step back, we must ask ourselves what on earth we are pressuring ourselves and each other for?

Reading has been, in many ways, cannibalized by productivity culture. I’ve seen more posts about “hacks” to push numbers up, to white-knuckle one’s way through a difficult text to get the book added to one’s tally, than I’ve seen posts about someone truly interacting with a text, discussing what they took away from it. Maybe it’s my algorithm, but that’s immaterial. The fact that it is happening matters.

What happens to author-to-reader reading, the intimate world of mind-to-mind connection, when the point of reading for pleasure at all shifts away from engaging with what you are reading, what you are taking away, to how many reading units you’ve checked off your list?

I wonder if it might look like a defensive social media post citing the number of books one read in seventy-two hours, with nary a mention of the author, let alone the title. Dear reader, in a world of books-as-KPI, does the author even fit in the margins anymore?

And why is that mode of reading worth coveting?

Here’s the truth: I don’t believe it is. 

Not because reading quickly is inherently bad, but because the metric itself is meaningless. It produces the appearance of information without offering any.

On the surface, metrics invite comparison. Which sounds more impressive: someone who read over 400 books in a year, or someone who exceeded their reading goal by nearly six-thousand percent? 

The second number was me. My reading goal was one book. I read sixty.

And here’s the problem: neither number tells you anything useful. Not what we read. Not why we read it. Not what stayed with us after the book was closed.

What’s left is comparison. So we see the endless, cyclical discourse, because it’s all we know about each other as readers at a glance.

What is a full-time professional toddler mom, who harbors delusions of professional authorship, to do?

Why, nothing short of reclaiming the concept of reading as an intentional act, of course. 

Reading for speed is easy to count. Reading for meaning is not.

But it’s so much more rewarding.

In 2025, I started keeping my own commonplace book. I write down passages that stop me, ideas that unsettle me, notes on how a book meets me where I am. Looking back, I can see which authors challenged me, when my thinking shifted, where something cracked open.

I can see the moment Mieko Kawakami made me cry –  what she said, how her quiet, contemplative prose gave me room to stretch out inside the story, to inhabit it rather than rush through it.

None of that can be captured on Goodreads. Or on any reading platform.

I don’t want it to be.

There’s no single way to take reading back. It will look different for every reader. But reclaiming reading means deciding, deliberately, what you want books to do to you. 

I will never choose to read seven books in seventy-two hours.

I will choose, every time, to let a book take its time with me.

That kind of change doesn't keep a schedule.