My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
My spouse and I dealt with this on our honeymoon. We were both working 50-80 hour weeks for months leading up to our trip. The first day we got to this all-inclusive resort we spent the whole time trying to min/max and be as efficient and calculated as possible. It was a stressful, miserable day.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". Gives time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
I have far more trust for people willing to say this.
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
I find that I'm more likely to do this but try to make an effort to stop. There's times to spitball but we should also spend time thinking. And let's be real 30-60s is not that long
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them.
He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind.
Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion.
He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe;
When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.
Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.
I really enjoy this train of thought. It rings true to me, its also something Hank Green was recently talking about with the negative effects of the internet. Its not that the internet is bad. We're starved for information and meaning and were being feed a diet of ultraprocessed food in the form of shorts and tiktoks. I think the solution this author laid out is good. Consume quality, with care.
This is one of the reason I use openbsd and emacs as my two main tools. There are better and more suited tools for some specific tasks. But using them is enjoyable and their core philosophy aligns to mine. And it’s not like I actually need those extra things.
After I finished reviewing the CS textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in the mid 1990s during a vacation (looking for errors before publication), I found that my brain had been permanently reconfigured for speed reading. For years afterwards, I would automatically read entire sentences at a time, to go as fast as possible. I think I have now recovered sufficiently so that I can read books one word at a time.
We read LOTR to our sons when they were little. It was likely the 6th time for me,and 3rd in English. Stupendous experience. The command of the English Tolkien had is sublime. Wish the movies didn't take so much liberty with Faramir.!!!
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
When I was about 10, I read the Hobbit to my younger brother (8), over a large number of half-hour car trips. It's one my prouder memories of that time.
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.
When learning to play a musical instrument and practicing a new song, some common advice is to play it as slowly as you can stand, to learn the motions well.
> I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.
This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I've taken the time to rebuild a large music collection locally. I've adopted every CD collection my friends and family have set aside to rust. It's immensely satisfying to scroll a gigantic list of 40,000 tracks and just pick whatever feels good, knowing I'm not contributing to a profile on my listening habits and that the file will instantly play flawlessly.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
It’s impossible to know if the content itself is worth the extra time and effort. Opportunity Cost is especially high in fiction. I agree that LotR should be on that list though.
Does Dostoyevsky really need the slow treatment? Some parts of crime and punishment merited rereading but, at least in English translation, I didn't find much in the style to savor. Really it was more thematically interesting and suspenseful.
In the original Russian, Dostoyevsky requires the slow treatment. He loves the sort of 1/3 page long sentences that perplex the fast-path parser and force the reader's brain to swap; as if he wants to drive you mad so that you can better understand the madmen whom he writes about.
There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.
One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.
One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are.
This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.
You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
It's interesting you mention that. Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
Now in the UK all we get are monotonous robots or people who have clearly had intensive coaching in how to speak in a clear. Decisive. Direct. Way, to inspire confidence and project competence. The two qualities entirely absent in most of our politicians.
The less said about the other side of the pond the better.
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
My spouse and I dealt with this on our honeymoon. We were both working 50-80 hour weeks for months leading up to our trip. The first day we got to this all-inclusive resort we spent the whole time trying to min/max and be as efficient and calculated as possible. It was a stressful, miserable day.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
Where’d you sleep? Going wit the flow and enjoying life is admirable but that sounds like a pretty terrible camp site tbh.
This can work with the way you think as well.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". Gives time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
The article literally says:
> limiting myself to mouth-speed
Audiobooks are mouth-speed.
The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.
Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.
Not each sentence but I do regularly pause and sometimes skip back in audiobooks, yes.
An audiobook is bad if you want to go extra slow. I don't think I want to go that slow.
The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.
Use the playback speed settings, tough hitting pause every once in a while is also a good idea
Audible and most audiobook player apps let you control the speed. I usually listen at 1.25 to 1.5
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
Interesting how in your second paragraph you do exactly the thing you said not to do in your first.
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
Is the entire thing narrated in Gollum’s voice?
He does lots of different voices, it's very good
Quote that I always like:
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them. He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest; Every year the green ivy grows longer. No news of the affairs of men, Only the occasional song of a woodcutter. The sun shines and I mend my robe; When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems. I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
[0] https://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2011/06/stop-chasing...
I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
¡Buen Camino! I walked it 10 years ago and hope to repeat it soon.
I can't control the speed that I read.
In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.
Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.
Audiobooks are great, while driving or walking or riding a bike. But for complex topics, I miss the ability to read a sentence or a paragraph again.
I really enjoy this train of thought. It rings true to me, its also something Hank Green was recently talking about with the negative effects of the internet. Its not that the internet is bad. We're starved for information and meaning and were being feed a diet of ultraprocessed food in the form of shorts and tiktoks. I think the solution this author laid out is good. Consume quality, with care.
This is one of the reason I use openbsd and emacs as my two main tools. There are better and more suited tools for some specific tasks. But using them is enjoyable and their core philosophy aligns to mine. And it’s not like I actually need those extra things.
After I finished reviewing the CS textbook "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" in the mid 1990s during a vacation (looking for errors before publication), I found that my brain had been permanently reconfigured for speed reading. For years afterwards, I would automatically read entire sentences at a time, to go as fast as possible. I think I have now recovered sufficiently so that I can read books one word at a time.
We read LOTR to our sons when they were little. It was likely the 6th time for me,and 3rd in English. Stupendous experience. The command of the English Tolkien had is sublime. Wish the movies didn't take so much liberty with Faramir.!!!
I can't wait to read LOTR to my (now four-year-old) son. Been looking forward to it since we started trying for a kid. Seriously, peak fatherhood moment. I'll savor it. That (and a few others are) on the embargo list: he's not allowed to see the film before we read the books. I wish I'd got Winnie the Pooh on there in time.
You're at a good time for The Hobbit. Strangely I find that Winnie the Pooh does not age well and is an awkward read.
The Wind in the Willows is good beginning around that age too.
I've not braved reading them LOTR yet, but my sons are still getting read to even as one's about to become a teenager; it's some of my favourite time in the evening and it allows me to force them through books just slightly too advanced, with lots of them stopping me to explain (or me stopping to editorialize, and provide historical context etc).
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
When I was about 10, I read the Hobbit to my younger brother (8), over a large number of half-hour car trips. It's one my prouder memories of that time.
I am currently reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 5 years old and not quite able to read it by himself yet. Nearly, but it's a lot for him to get through. Some evenings I use my Kindle, some evenings I use the copy I've owned since I was 11.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.
When learning to play a musical instrument and practicing a new song, some common advice is to play it as slowly as you can stand, to learn the motions well.
Or, never play it faster than you can play it perfectly.
> I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.
This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.
It's a capability with which having children will make you intimately familiar
By the 3rd week of Goodnight Moon at bedtime, are you still reading the printed words?
I had, by chance, taken the same approach when reading the Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago.
The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.
It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.
Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.
All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.
Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I've taken the time to rebuild a large music collection locally. I've adopted every CD collection my friends and family have set aside to rust. It's immensely satisfying to scroll a gigantic list of 40,000 tracks and just pick whatever feels good, knowing I'm not contributing to a profile on my listening habits and that the file will instantly play flawlessly.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
(Same with the DVD collections.)
It’s impossible to know if the content itself is worth the extra time and effort. Opportunity Cost is especially high in fiction. I agree that LotR should be on that list though.
Does Dostoyevsky really need the slow treatment? Some parts of crime and punishment merited rereading but, at least in English translation, I didn't find much in the style to savor. Really it was more thematically interesting and suspenseful.
In the original Russian, Dostoyevsky requires the slow treatment. He loves the sort of 1/3 page long sentences that perplex the fast-path parser and force the reader's brain to swap; as if he wants to drive you mad so that you can better understand the madmen whom he writes about.
Wait until you get to The Brothers Karamazov.
There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.
One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.
Were you reading it in the original Russian?
Haven’t gotten around to re-reading Dostoyevsky. But Turgenev’s English translations absolutely benefit from slow reading.
Fathers and Sons were absolute masterpiece.
One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are.
This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.
You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
And presumably political speeches from Republican America combines the best of those two?
It's interesting you mention that. Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.
Now in the UK all we get are monotonous robots or people who have clearly had intensive coaching in how to speak in a clear. Decisive. Direct. Way, to inspire confidence and project competence. The two qualities entirely absent in most of our politicians.
The less said about the other side of the pond the better.
I'm sympathetic to the general point, but with food, you can always just eat more! Best of both worlds!
Being able to truly tap into boredom is a superpower
LotR is a product of a slower era. I wonder how a modern/recent example would compare
There's certainly slow books still being written but most fantasy books in specific assume a certain amount of knowledge about a tolkien-esque world. You can do entirely new worlds, and some people do, but most stories are about people and the choices they make.
Maybe Robert Jordan or James SA Corey?
I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
Not modern but
- Herman Hesse
I see that some others have suggested getting an Audio book version for you to listen to at your pleasure.
I came here to say "I hope that you are recording yourself so that you create your OWN audiobook"