Reading slowly on purpose
Twelve pages a day, a pencil, and no summaries.
Last year I read fewer books than any year since university, and remembered more of them than ever.
The method is not clever. Twelve pages a day, with a pencil. No summaries, no highlights exported to an app, no speed. When a paragraph is good I read it twice. When I disagree, I write the disagreement in the margin, in a full sentence.
Why twelve pages
Twelve is small enough that I never skip a day and large enough that a long book still ends. It is also, I found, about how much I can read before my attention starts pretending.
What the pencil does
A margin note is a conversation. Writing “no, because” forces me to finish the thought, and finishing the thought is where the reading actually happens. The notes I make this way are the only ones I ever go back to.
What I gave up
Volume, mostly. I will not get through the list. But the books I have read slowly have stayed, and the ones I read fast to reach a number are already gone.