Do you feel that speed reading hurts your enjoyment of fiction? I'm a slow reader and one the one hand I want to improve so that I can read more stuff but on the other hand I feel that it will ruin literature for me. Some sentences lose all impact when you blaze through them at 100KMH.
I can't say if this is generalizable, but it certainly hurts my enjoyment of fiction. I read a metric shitton of fiction. I used to read fiction professionally, in fact. I remain a very slow fiction reader, at least subjectively, based on my assessment of my friends', peers', and family members' fiction-reading speeds. But speed isn't really the point when I read fiction.
Speed reading has its place, but I will never comprehend the desire to apply speed reading to pleasure reading. Those two goals, speed and pleasure, seem orthogonal at best to me.
Speed reading is all well and good when you have more on your desk than you can handle, and you need to get the gist of everything quickly. It's a triage technique.
I'd love to speed read for pleasure. That's because most of my pleasure reading is nonfiction. I don't particularly enjoy the reading; I just like learning new things and having my mind expanded a bit. If I could breeze through nonfiction at 1000wpm with great understanding, I'd be all over that. The ability to do so would be worth thousands of dollars to me.
But in my experience, things like Spritz, Spreeder, or just moving eyes faster are fine when the sentences are short and repetitive: "Most people read at 250wpm. You are now reading at 350 wpm. That is 40% faster than most people. And this isn't even hard, right?" When I try to use such techniques to read about, say, relativity, quantum mechanics, or international development, my comprehension approaches 0.
I have a good reading speed. When I'm caught up in a book, it increases because I want to know what happens next.
The fastest that I ever was timed when I read Clan of the Cave Bear in a single sitting. Afterwards my mother and I worked out that I'd done it at an average of 900 wpm.
So no, I don't find that reading fast hurts my enjoyment of fiction. At least some kinds of fiction.
I had a boss with a very average IQ but who was a competent manager. A couple of times, I flew on business trips with him, and we sat in different parts of the plane. Both times, I would get up to walk around the plane a bit and see him over in his seat going through some recent bestselling novel. Amazingly (to me), I would see him burning through his beach literature at an average rate of about 100 pages/hr, which would be about 600wpm, except that he took breaks. I'd guess that he read at about 700-750wpm. He wasn't trying to impress anyone; he was just sitting by himself reading to pass the time.
This was astonishing to me. I read a lot more than he did and had a much richer vocabulary, yet I wouldn't have been able to follow the story at even half that speed. I eventually asked him about it and reached the conclusion that we read in different ways. I'm bored by books like that and usually read things that I have to think about to understand. If I do read a book like his, I read a bit and drift off thinking about it, then read a bit more and drift off in thought.... He rips through it with so much speed and focus that he apparently "experiences" it like a movie without drifting off into analysis. The speed intensifies the experience for him; it doesn't ruin it.
I've tried to do it but without success. I seem to be trained to chew my food, not inhale it. And he used to tease me about the things I would read for fun, apparently considering them unspeakably boring and nearly indecipherable.
I think there is more diversity in the action of reading than most of us imagine.
The intensification of experience sounds familiar to me. The very average IQ, not so much. ;-)
That said, we undoubtably read different stuff. I like reading fiction that is meant to be enjoyed, and non-fiction that teaches me about various things. But when it comes to philosophy, well, I'm with Dijkstra. About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
I have the opposite experience. I tend to read good fiction -- the nice, trashy, swords-and-sorcery-and-spaceships stuff, not the deep, meaningful War and Peace stuff -- at speeds way above my comprehension level. I enjoy it just fine, my imagination fully engaged, and I'm just accidentally skipping words and sentences and paragraphs in my eagerness to find out what happens next. When I go back and reread a good book, I always encounter material I know I missed on the first time through.
Nonfiction on the other hand -- textbooks and papers and the like, the real information dense stuff, not the light and fluffy pop science books -- I read at a much more plodding pace, carefully reading each word, skipping nothing, and frequently backing up to reread a paragraph.
