[Bjorkbat]

I’ve been thinking of that a lot as well. What’s the point of being able to read fast if you miss the fine details? What’s the point if you read so fast that you just sort of forget everything?

One of the many issues I have with contemporary literate culture, another being those who insist on reading a large volume of books, on being “well read”, rather than focusing on quality.

[viraptor]

In defence of skimming books: Not everyone is enjoying reading the same way. Not even one person in different contexts. There are books where I'm going to be engaged completely. There are others I'll enjoy for main plot but will want to skip the fluff. I'm extreme cases I'll gloss over a whole paragraph as "whatever, I don't care about the scenery". Being able to skim quickly to the next interesting part is a good skill.

But the comment made me think - can we even improve the comprehension, as in processing what we read? (not as in understanding the vocabulary/structure) I've never heard of ways to purposefully do that.

[roelschroeven]

For me an important part of reading fast is finding out which parts are interesting and which parts are not, and then focusing more on the interesting parts.