If you could read faster, would you?

Literature lessons from a bowl of chili

I approach reading books much like cooking a batch of homemade chili. Chili tastes best when you allow the flavors to build and gain complexity. Sure, you can churn and burn, but you’ll miss out on the meal’s potential, the character that develops only with time and care.

There will always be moments when you’re forced to settle for anything edible, with disregard for everything but convenience. I get that. Just, in those moments, don’t reach for chili.

I feel the same way about books, which is why I am a purposely slow reader. A methodical reader. A reader who will re-read the same paragraph three times if I think it contains cleverly concealed insight that needs careful examination before a deeper understanding will emerge from the text.

Most of my day-to-day life is spent in overdrive. Books represent a voluntary opportunity to change the pace and disappear into another world. I think that’s impossible to do if that world is blowing by at 600 words per minute.

Perhaps, therefore, my appreciation for detailed reading (or my disdain for superficial reading), led me to click on this headline today:

This insane new app will allow you to read novels in under 90 minutes

When I buy a book for my Kindle, I get a pretty good return on my investment, in terms of entertainment hours. If I borrow a book from the library, I’m usually good for multiple renewals before I return it. This new app, named Spritz, apparently seeks to relieve me of both of those qualities.

The technology is intriguing. You choose the pace, and the program displays the content one word at a time. The slower settings are like reading an electronic billboard. The fastest setting is like a literary strobe light. The rapid-fire nature is enough to leave you practically breathless after 30 seconds. I can’t fathom enjoying a novel read this way over the course of 90 minutes, nor am I sure there’s enough Advil to get me through the exercise. I am willing to give it a try in the future for the sake of edu-tainment, though I’ll probably have to shoot for a Dan Brown title rather than Dostoyevsky.

Spritz claims that when you are reading, only 20 percent of your time is spent processing content while the other 80 percent is occupied by moving your eyes from word to word and line to line. The app’s technology attempts to circumvent this by highlighting the “optimal recognition point” within each word to expedite your processing time. The Spritz website explains the approach more robustly.

Whether or not it works or works well, Spritz introduces a new offspring of the ancient debate: “Sure you CAN do it; but SHOULD you?”

That will likely boil down to personal preference. If you enjoy reading for pleasure, this technology may hold little interest for you. If you need a utilitarian solution for the rapid consumption of material, you may have a winner. Maybe Spritz will find a niche in helping people read the fine print of their 50-page mortgage application or the user manual for their new dishwasher.

More likely, Spritz will become useful for news consumption. I can see value in reading an entire newspaper in 10 minutes. I’ll also bet this technology will become the darling of college students worldwide. Countless undergrads hoping to tear through their required reading in record time will probably set the market. I could have used it for introduction to macroeconomics. Just don’t touch my Shakespeare.

Time will tell if this invention is merely a novelty or indeed a practical tool. I predict it will have staying power, at least in some segments. There are plenty of people who read only out of necessity.

When it comes to literature, however, I’d prefer this gadget stay out of my kitchen. I’ll take a slow simmer over fast food any day.

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6 thoughts on “If you could read faster, would you?

      • Hahaha, yes. Just yes to that last part. Also, I find the colours to be too irritating. They’re too bold and I can’t help but think that that would cause headaches.

  1. It’s very personal. I am also a purposeful slow reader of lit, because I want to chew it and taste it. But I am a purposeful efficient reader of news and blogs. I choose my platforms based on this.

    • I’m a rapid news reader, too, so I definitely agree with an approach customized to the content. Maybe this app will eventually become a verb. When we have news or other content that doesn’t require as much reflective thought, we’ll say, “I’ll just Spritz it.”

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