I used to pride myself on how fast I could get through a book. Thirty books a year, sometimes more. I'd track them on Goodreads, stack them on my nightstand, feel productive. Then one day I realized I couldn't remember the ending of a novel I'd finished two weeks earlier. Not a vague recollection, just nothing. The whole thing had passed through me like water through a sieve.
That's when I started reading slower. Not because someone told me to, but because I was tired of forgetting.
What slow reading actually means
Slow reading isn't about reading at a snail's pace or sounding out every syllable. It's about giving a book the kind of attention you'd give a conversation with someone you care about. You stay with a sentence if it's good. You re-read a paragraph when your mind wandered the first time. You stop to think about what the author meant, not just what the words say on the surface.
The closest comparison I can think of is the difference between eating a meal and tasting it. You can wolf down pasta in four minutes. Or you can notice the garlic, the way the sauce coats the noodles, the texture of the bread. Same food, different experience entirely.
The science behind it
A 2014 study from the University of Stavanger in Norway found that readers who took their time with a text scored higher on comprehension tests and retained information longer than speed readers. That's not surprising. What surprised me was the emotional difference. Slow readers reported feeling more connected to the characters and more affected by the story's events.
Another study, this one from the University of California, looked at what happens in the brain during deep reading. The short version: your brain lights up in areas associated with empathy, spatial reasoning, and emotional processing. Skimming doesn't trigger the same response. You're getting the plot, but you're missing the texture.
How to actually do it
Here's what worked for me, after a lot of trial and error.
First, pick a time when you're not rushed. For me, that's early morning before anyone else is awake — I've written before about why swapping your morning scroll for a book changes everything. For you, it might be lunch breaks or late evening. The time doesn't matter as much as the absence of a ticking clock.
Second, put your phone in another room. Not on silent, not face-down on the table. In another room. I know this sounds obvious, but I spent months failing at slow reading because my phone was always within arm's reach. The moment I started locking it in the kitchen, my reading sessions doubled in length without any effort.
Third, pick a book that rewards slow reading. Not every book needs it. A thriller can be read fast; that's part of the fun. But a novel by Marilynne Robinson, or a collection of essays by James Baldwin, or anything by W.G. Sebald, those books change when you give them time. The sentences open up. You start noticing patterns you'd miss at speed.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." That's Proust, and I think he was talking about exactly this.
Fourth, don't track progress. I stopped counting pages per session and hours per book. I stopped logging finished books on Goodreads for a while (I've since gone back, but without the competitive edge). The goal isn't to finish. The goal is to read.
What changed for me
I read fewer books now. Maybe twelve to fifteen a year instead of thirty. But I remember them. I can talk about them — which is why finding people to discuss books with has become such an important part of my reading life. When someone asks me what I've been reading, I don't just list titles, I can tell them what the book made me think about, what I disagreed with, what kept me up past midnight because I couldn't put it down.
The other change was unexpected: I started writing better. Something about reading carefully, paying attention to how sentences are built, how paragraphs move, how a writer handles a transition, it rubs off. You absorb craft by proximity.
I'm not saying everyone should read slowly. Some people genuinely enjoy speed reading, and that's fine. But if you've ever finished a book and felt like it didn't stick, or if reading has started to feel like a chore rather than a pleasure, try slowing down. Give it a week. See what happens.