One more blog, and he gets a set of steak knives.

And, on his other blog, John Scalzi talks about reading speed. He apparently reads really fast. I’m not sure if I’m a fast reader or not. I know that I can be; when I first read Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I got through them all in less than two weeks (both trilogies). But I had a college room-mate who encountered them for the first time when he picked up my copies, and he polished them off in about three days.

I also tend to have multiple books going at once, and those will fall into categories: what I call “Waypost” books, meaning books I intend to finish fairly quickly, and “Companion” books, which are the books that I dip into a small amount at a time. Thus, right now one of my “Waypost” books is James Clavell’s Shogun, which I’m about one-fifth of the way through, while The Iliad is one of my “Companion” books – – I tend to read no more than four pages or so of it in a day. I also try to get through books that I’m reviewing for GMR faster than I do books that I’m reading for my own amusement and amazement, because there is a certain obligation connected with those books.

I’m well-acquainted with the “Book so good I wish it didn’t have to end” phenomenon – – Guy Gavriel Kay’s books do it to me, frex – – but I don’t translate that into slower reading. If anything, I tend to plow through them even faster, because I can’t help myself. I’m a big fan of allowing myself to be swept away by narrative, and pacing myself in reading simply goes against every part of my being. I read a Gene Wolfe essay about Lord of the Rings once, in which Wolfe wrote that when he first read LOTR he allowed himself a single chapter a day, but with the provision that he could re-read anything up to that day’s chapter to his heart’s content. I couldn’t do that. When I get a book that commands me to keep reading, I plow ahead until I either finish or I realize that if I don’t put the damn thing down now I am going to only get about four hours’ sleep.

Finally, John says that he envies people who read slower, because – – I am paraphrasing – – they get to spend more time in the authors’ worlds. I think I envy John more, though. If there’s one thing about death that scares the living crap out of me, it’s that it will inevitably happen at a time when I’ve still got a pile of books to get through. But then, that’s true for anyone, no matter how fast they read.

(By the way, I wonder if there is any correlation between reading speed and writing output?)