[goopthink]

Best speed reading technique is actually to just skip the boring bits - the fluff that most nonfiction books include to move the narrative between ideas or to reiterate a point. Combine that with note taking and you have a very powerful reading technique. Same thing for most fiction, because a lot of words are spent on exposition and to get a character to/from a scene.

There’s certain kinds of dense nonfiction this doesn’t work for (dense because it doesn’t have filler), or literary nonfiction (that you can slowly savor for the writing or narrative).

I used to relish a choice set of words to describe an idea in a way that just makes it click for me, but I’ve found that (a) this doesn’t lose that because a well written sentence that doesn’t communicate anything of substance is actually a bad sentence (style over substance), and that most sentences (in nonfiction) are pretty bad, and that’s ok. Moreover, I’ve found that simpler writing ends up being more effective, regardless of any personal preferences for Cormac McCarthy-like prose.