Speaking of reading...
Two books items that caught my eye:
1) They're more ambitious than me over at The New Yorker, where the magazine's books staff is devoting January to reading Roberto Bolano's 900-page novel "2666" and declaring January to be National Reading "2666" Month.
2) An L.A. Times books blogger, Sarah Weinman, says she read (gulp) 462 novels in 2008. Whew. Me, I read 24 books last year, some of them art books, and was hoping to quicken the pace to 30, 40, even 50 this year, if they're short enough. How does Weinman read so quickly? Read the Q&A with her and be sure to read the comments afterward. Some fellow speedfreaks share their stories, such as the person who, at 11, read the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in one day. Then there are those more like me, who admit to being easily distracted. I also like the occasional smart-aleck commenter, like the one who says she can't write more because she has to read all of Proust in the next half-hour.
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A journalist for more than two decades, David Allen has been writing a column for the Daily Bulletin since 1997 and blogging since 2007.He lives in Claremont.
E-mail David here or read columns here.
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I used to fly through SF novels at the rate of 1/day when not in classes. But, technical reading destroyed my ability to synch up my thinking with my reading, and my reading speed dropped way down. Now I can't read without thinking about it on the way.
A friend of mine took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course, but it didn't work as far as comprehension was concerned. His family successfully sued for a refund. If I remember correctly, JFK was a speed reader and may have recommended Wood.
Fiction can be read quickly because it has very low information density; its value, beyond entertainment, is that it is tremendously redundant so that any message is easily retrieved via multiple memory connections. Its disadvantage is that the message may be pure BS. My daughter's Honors English class will probably be more intense than any other HS course she takes, but it is largely an exercise in how to write BS effectively.
[Could be good preparation for the business world, though. -- DA]
Bush and Bush's brain, apparently, have been in a book-reading competition, according to Karl Rove in his WSJ column.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025595706634689.html)
In 2007, the president allegedly read 51 books to Rove's 76. Rove wrote, "The president lamely insisted he'd lost because he'd been busy as Leader of the Free World."
[In 2007 I read 10 books. I guess I lost this competition to the president because I'd been busy as a newspaper columnist. -- DA]