Speed Reading?

I’m always astonished at the speed at which other people get through books. I don’t mean the hours they are prepared to spend reading – I’m quite prepared to spend those hours too – but the actual rate at which they move down a page.
I’ve just done a quick calculation on both the books I’m reading at the moment: Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces and Julie Hearn’s The Merrybegot. Given that the Faulks has much denser type and runs at just over 400 words a page whereas Julie Hearn’s book has around 250 words to a page, from the time it takes me to read a page of each, I calculate that I read just over 200 words a minute.

A quick Google-search reveals that that average (American) person reads English at 220 words per minute. This makes me feel better – I’m about average in terms of reading speed. I always though I was monumentally slow. (Maybe I’m just monumentally slow for people who read a lot?) But this revelation of my averageness must mean that almost all those whose reading habits I am familiar with are well above average. All the members of my book swallow up books as if there was a prize for finishing quickly. My Other Half reads approximately twice as fast as I do and can easily read a whole book in an afternoon.

I wonder if it’s to do with how you read? I hear pretty well every word inside my head as I read and, actually, 220 words per minute is only just over the upper limit of average spoken words per minute (Google again – where would we be without it?) If you simply process written words by seeing them and don’t have to run them through the hearing bit of your brain, I suspect you’re bound to be able to read more quickly, vision being able to take in chunks whereas the ear has to work in a systematically sound-by-sound way.

Unless you count the fact that my ‘books to be read’ pile is so big that it flows down off my bedside cabinet, on to the floor and out into the landing, my inability to read quickly has only ever really been a drawback at University. I read English and the time necessary to get my head around, for instance, three or four Dickens novels in a week (plus Anglo Saxon poetry – it was two essays a week in those days and down the salt mines in your spare time…) left me absolutely no time to read any works of criticism. So I had to decide – read the great works of Eng Lit or read the critics? Please! I’d come to Oxford to read English, why would I want to know what somebody had said about Tennyson more than I wanted to know what Tennyson had said himself?

Of course, there was the small matter of producing acceptable essays. The drawback with not reading critics – people who are prepared to tell you what’s good, what’s bad and what the guy is basically going on about – is that you have to work out, all by yourself, what is important in these towering works of genius. No wonder my tutor once remarked that I produced ‘wonderfully idiosyncratic’ essays.
Still, I comfort myself with the thought that, just occasionally, my inability to process sufficient written words in a week might have had the unintended effect of providing an amusing interlude for the poor, overworked man.

Nice author, nice book?

I’ve just left a comment over at the Mostly Books blog which made me stop and think about my reading habits.
I was responding to the lastest post about a visit to the shop by author Julie Hearn. I said:
She sounded so fab that I went straight to her website. Then, because she still sounded lovely and her books sounded very much like the sort of thing I love, I to went to my local bookshop and bought the only one they had 'The Merrybegot'. It's already been promoted to the top of the 'to be read' pile!
Which it has.

But would I have bought Ms Hearn’s book if I’d thought it sounded great but she, personally, did not come across as the sort of person I would like to find myself stuck on a desert island with? [Or as a friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia says, darkly ‘in a bunker with’…] Do I, in other words, only read/buy books by people I like?

After racking my brains and casting an eye over the bookshelf pile which contains all the most recently read books in the house, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. If I hear or read an author interview and the subject comes across as pretentious or misogynistic or objectionable, I probably wouldn't buy their books. Not because I wouldn't want to contribute to their bank balance (although...) but because reading something written by somebody whose basic attitude to people was so different to my own would probably lead to me feeling out of sorts and at cross purposes with what I'm reading. And life's too short, and I read too slowly, to spend time on novels which make you feel like that.

But what if the book was in a genre I really liked and that particular book seemed fantastically interesting?
Hmmm. Would I give up reading Minette Walters’ books if I found out that she was anything other than lovely? Or Philippa Gregory’s? Or Tracy Chevalier’s, Joanne Harris’, Sue Gee’s…

I suppose the cop-out answer is that these authors could not write such humane and engrossing books if they were unpleasant, narrow-minded or mean-spirited.

So, do I like books because I intuit, somehow, that their writers are nice people? Or because they give me an insight into other lives, other worlds and take me on a journey of discovery?

Perhaps it's just that the way my favourite writers look at the lives of their subjects and the world in which they live chimes with something in me.

Do other people read and enjoy books by authors whom they know they would dislike intensely if they actually met them? Or am I alone in my strange reading prejudices?