On reading slowly

Most of what I read is read in order to have read it. Articles are skimmed for their conclusions, books are finished so that they can be counted. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is only one kind of reading.

A different kind happens when one page is allowed to take an evening. The sentence is turned over, set down, picked up again. A word that seemed ordinary begins to look strange. Sometimes nothing happens at all, and the page is simply kept company for a while.

The old monastic word for this was lectio: reading as a form of attention rather than a means of acquiring information. It asks less for intelligence than for patience, and it rewards returning to the same text many times. The text does not change, but the reader does.

I keep a short list of books for this kind of reading. They are not difficult books, only ones that seem to grow larger the slower they are read. The list is on the reading page.