[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.