How I learned to read

I started reading at 5-4-3 years. The figure, called my mother, for some reason decreases with time. I still remember the sofa, a fluffy blanket on it, and a few letters carved from colored paper. “Mom”, “Dad”, “Sasha” - making up words seemed like a miracle.

Having learned to make words, I quietly learned to disassemble them. Andersen's Tales, “Deniskin Tales”, encyclopedias - so much to read! And I read. Reading no longer seemed a miracle, but how many miracles were there in the described worlds.

In five or six years there was a breakthrough. My father read something of his own, I read "Dunno in the Sunny City" (Saint Feynman, I still remember it!). I pronounced the words carefully, out loud, monotonously - and this prevented my father from concentrating on his book. He asked me to read in silence , and I was surprised:
- How is it, silently?
- Like me.
He really didn't say a word when he read. I tried it and it worked out. At first he moved his lips, then the need for this crutch disappeared. I wonder if my diction suffered from an early transition to reading “for myself” - or something else?

In any case, it was not the end. At school, I began to read quickly . More precisely, the fastest in the classroom. Then it seemed that the greatest reading speed makes me the smartest. It is a pity that this error was dispelled too late.
')
The next step is 16 years, and reading on the Internet. There I learned to skip the unnecessary (EULA and other agreements). A couple of years later, I had to learn how to isolate the necessary information from the trash flows - it was time for the students.

At 25 I learned not to read : it saves a lot of time. News, blogs, habr , most of the professional literature - how many opportunities open if you turn away from all this. Don't misunderstand me: reading is not in itself a bad thing. The bad is reading unnecessary. In my case, boredom has played its role: why is it worth reading the news if it is repeated day after day? Why read another article on Expression Trees, if you’ve already read that half a year ago and yourself realized a bike with a rather elegant system on these very trees?

Soon I’m 30, and recently I learned to read slowly . While reading Brooks's Mythical Man-Month I asked myself questions: “how did the author come to this?”, “What has changed over the past decades?”, “Does it matter now?”, “How does this relate to the previous point?”. I asked these questions for each sub-chapter, for each episode - the reading speed dropped by an order of magnitude. Now I don’t remember almost anything from this book. Disappointing experiment, right? You should not blame the book for such a result: firstly, now it is somewhat outdated, secondly, I knew part of it before reading (the ideas described there are now common; an excellent result for publication).

The next experiment - "How to graze cats." I wanted to close the book after the statement that a manager without an individual style is bullshit not a manager. After a few sub-chapters, it turned out that the author recommends not blindly following the patterns, but rebuilding them for himself, the team and the situation, forming an individual style. Feel the moment? First, frustration, and then understanding. I don’t know if it was the author’s idea, a translation feature, or simply following the canons of American management literature — but without thoughtful reading, such a transition would go unnoticed. I didn’t read the book myself: I realized that I lack experience. Or maybe the book is just slag, at least in modern reality.

One intelligent person recommended that I read thoughtfully only professional literature that would be useful in work for a long time . For everything else, there is stackoverlow. Given the previous paragraph - it is worth reading what you at least somehow understand, or what you will work with in the very near future. In an extreme case - you can quickly run through the book for the first time, and then dig into details.

The last option I tried was to slow down my own reading : the acceptance test of the chapter I just studied. It is necessary to recall a summary of what was read, to re-read quickly and to compare the memorized with the actual. Now I slowly read the “habits of highly effective people” and do not regret at all the time spent on thinking. It's worth it.