In the winter of 2024, Marguerite Adler set out to read one hundred books in a single calendar year. She kept a list in a black Moleskine on the kitchen counter, ruled with a pencil, and on December 28 she crossed off the ninety-fourth title — Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring — and quietly stopped counting.
It was not that the project had failed in any external sense. Ninety-four books in a year is more than most working readers will finish. What had failed, she would say later in a piece for this magazine, was the project itself.
She could not remember most of them.
She could remember covers. She could remember rooms in which she had read them — a hotel in Lisbon, the Acela between New York and Boston, the front porch in Marblehead in late August. She could remember the dust jacket of the Fitzgerald, which was a particular shade of green that she had liked. What she could not remember was a single sentence.
This is the case against fast reading, and it is not a new one. Sven Birkerts made it in 1994 in The Gutenberg Elegies, and Alberto Manguel made it in 1996 in A History of Reading, and the medieval scholastics made it in essentially every century before that. They called it lectio, slow reading, and they distinguished it from cursus, which was the kind of reading one did to get through the office of the hours before lunch.
What is new, perhaps, is the scale at which fast reading is now being marketed as a virtue.
There are applications now that will read a book to you in twenty minutes. There are services that will summarize a book in three pages. There is a category of reader on social media — usually well-meaning, often very young — for whom the goal is the number on the year-end shelf rather than the book on it.
None of this is criminal. The cost is not legible in the obvious places.
The cost shows up later, when the reader cannot remember the book a month after finishing it, and then cannot remember whether she finished it at all, and then begins, slowly, to lose the sense that she has ever really read anything.
Adler's argument is not that one should read slowly because slow reading is morally superior. She is allergic to that argument, and she says so in the piece. Slow reading is not a virtue. It is a method.
What it is a method for, she suggests, is the only thing reading is finally good for, which is the production of an inner voice that has been altered, even slightly, by another mind.
This is a modest claim. It is also a difficult one to test.
The test she proposes is private. Pick a book one has loved. Open it to a page one does not remember. Read a single paragraph aloud, slowly, in the room one is in. Ask whether the sentence one has just spoken sounds like a sentence that has, at any point, been inside one's own thinking.
If it does, the book was read. If it does not, the book was processed.
The distinction is not pedantic. A book that has been processed sits on the shelf as a kind of trophy. A book that has been read sits inside the reader's syntax, which is a more durable form of storage.
Adler is careful, in the piece, not to prescribe a speed. She does not say one should read at fifteen pages an hour, or thirty. She says one should read at the speed at which one is, in fact, thinking the sentences.
For some books this is fast. For some it is very slow. For Henry James it is, in her experience, roughly the speed of conversation with a slightly deaf older relative.
The pleasures of fast reading are real. There is the pleasure of momentum, the pleasure of plot, the pleasure of finishing. None of these are nothing. Adler has, she says, finished a Lee Child novel in a single Sunday afternoon and considered the day well spent.
What she would not do, she writes, is mistake the Lee Child afternoon for the thing she means when she says she has been reading.
The last paragraph of the essay is the most quoted, and it is the one she is most embarrassed by. It says, simply, that the test of a year of reading is not what one has finished but what has finished, in some small way, with one.
She has, she says, four or five books that meet this test in any given year. The other ninety she has, by her own confession, lost.
It is not a tragedy. It is a record-keeping problem, and she has, by writing it down, slightly improved her own record.