First we learned to chew our food, then to take the B roads.
Now, it seems, in a bid to hold back the inexorable rush of modern life, we are able to join Slow Reading groups so that we can fully appreciate the joy of the written word.
This somewhat startling idea is the brainchild of a British arts festival administrator in New Zealand called Meg Williams, who was fed up with never finishing a book, despite having a degree in English and a love of literature.
The ubiquitous book groups of yore, however, were not to Ms Williams's taste. No, rather than sit around listening to other people's thoughts on the latest Lionel Shriver, this bibliophile wanted simply to be in a room with equally earnest readers, who could spend the time turning the pages in silence of whatever book they decided to bring along.
Like me, you are probably thinking we can do that any day of the week, if not at home then in the dentist's waiting room, or the library, or on the bus, all without any obligation to be sociable and wonder whose turn it was to bring the biscuits. There is more to it, though.
Just as the slow food movement is about savouring the entire process of finding ingredients, and making and eating the result, so slow reading is about rejecting the lazy, partial reading we are all guilty of when we go online. It entails not just dedicating oneself to a book, but putting beyond our reach all the e-distractions that prevent us ever finishing Don Quixote - twitter, Facebook, Netflix. Getting out of the house, one is meant to leave behind all temptations and instead find space and time to read a well-written book, the sort which, when you have finished it gives a glow of satisfaction as well as pleasure.
I ought to like this idea but, to be honest, it seems completely daft. Never having succumbed to the allure of a conventional book group, I see no reason to submit myself to an exercise in enforced self-discipline that, if they are so keen to read properly, most adults ought to be able to do in the privacy of their own home.
Nor do I understand the term slow reading. There is reading, and there is speed reading, and there is skimming, but when faced with a book anyone who does anything but take in every word is not really reading at all. Of course some novels can be scampered through: Roddy Doyle or Irvine Welsh are writers whose whip-cracking dialogue has to be gulped down almost in real time. That cannot be said of Proust or Henry James, George Eliot, James Joyce or Alice Munro, whose words are the literary equivalent of a dab of oil on Turner's brush, each laid on for effect. The loss of a single one of them would deplete the whole.
However, since slow reading seems about to take off in these islands, I wonder if bookshops, writers or reviewers could offer a bespoke service, to help readers sort out those books suited to literature's sprinters from those that deserve the attention one gives to planting a garden and watching it grow.
Bookshelves or e-readers could, for instance, be graded, from the quick to the dead slow. Size is not always a guide, lest anyone think they can achieve such segregation cheaply by tape measure. Diana Gabaldon's gigantic novels can be hurtled through at breakneck speed, much the same way she pitches her characters through wormholes in time; while Andre Gide's novellas will take four times as long to read. They do have the added advantage, though, that they can be carried around without risk of pulling a muscle. They also repay rereading.
In fact, it is often on the second or third encounter that one can give a book the close attention it deserves. I am now at an age when I am revisiting titles I first encountered decades ago. It's taken me years to learn how much they have to offer as one's perspective on life matures. Does that qualify me as slow?
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