[cheerlessbog]

Assuming the LotR audio book is 45 hours you must be reading twice as fast to finish it in two long days at the weekend. Sure, I could read it that fast - meaning that mechanically I could probably decode the text as if the tape was double speed - but it would be a miserable experience because I would have no time to contemplate what was going on, to visualize events, to think back to previous passages, and so forth. It would be like watching a movie at double speed - we can all do it, and legitimately say we "watched" the movie, but it wouldn't give most of us pleasure.

[ksdale]

I think this is exactly the point of people having different reading speeds, though. What is uncomfortably fast for one person is normal speed for someone else, including considering all of the implications of each sentence they're reading. I don't know that I could read the LoTR in two days, but I do know that the pace of audio books is painfully slow for me. My natural speed would be substantially faster than the audio book and I wouldn't be racing through at an unpleasant pace.

And I believe what the parent was trying to say was that we've been conditioned to believe that a certain speed is normal, when perhaps most of us are capable of reading (and fully comprehending) at a much higher speed, though I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.

[cheerlessbog]

As an independent data point, consider the pace that someone might tell you a story that they know by heart (ie, which they aren't reading from text). Perhaps a storyteller or a actors monologue. In my experience that speed would be much the same speed as if they were reading the book to you, or reading it to themselves. That suggests to me that there is a natural speed to fully absorb a narrative.

Non fiction may be different. Most times I read that to absorb the content rather then for pleasure, and often it doesn't require deep introspection during the process. It is limited only by the physical process and the intellectual decoding speed. In those cases I read very fast. I typically am continually and quickly scrolling a newspaper story on my phone, reading at least twice as fast as fiction.

[ksdale]

Yeah I can definitely see that. I may just be weird. A lot of people in the comments here are talking about not subvocalizing to read faster, and I have never really worked on doing that, but according to the couple possibly unreliable reading speed tests I’ve taken, I read really fast, despite subvocalizing. So perhaps as long as I subvocalize, I can fully absorb the narrative? I also know that I can read slightly faster when I try not to subvocalize, but I’m not very good at it and I would never try to read a novel that way because I feel like THAT would destroy the narrative, at least for me.