Harold Bloom claimed that he could read 500-700 pages in an hour (which, even without delving into it, is simply ludicrous).Dan Schneider from the e-cosmoetica website claimed that he read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest within 7-8 hours, justifying himself by saying that it was so bad that he "cut through it like water".The only major problem with that statement is that Infinite Jest has a word count of over 500,000, meaning even if he read the entire novel in 8 hours, he would have had to read over a thousand words every minute on average. According to cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, speed reading of up to 1,000 words per minute "must be viewed with scepticism", so for Dan Schneider to surpass that pace for more than 8 hours straight is beyond ludicrous. For professional speed readers who claim a 1000-2000 wpm pace, they, on average, can only retain approximately 50% of the information read.I feel like it's a very odd thing to lie about, and it seems to stem from some need to justify their intelligence to the public.I think it's an important asterisk to put next to these literary critics when it's possible that they haven't even actually read some of the literary works they are critiquing and have simply skimmed them.
>>24813674>it's another "i can't handle the fact that savants have existed throughout history" threadshameful
I don't believe in critics in general because I like forming my own opinions. Why would I care about some critic's view on something artistic? Maybe he doesn't have the same taste as I do. At the end of the day everyone decides what they like and what they don't. It shouldn't even be a job.
>>24813674you are just wasting time if you are reading articles, pronouns, prepositions and other superfluous parts of a book
>>24813681this.>Terrence Tao claimed to master university level mathematics at age nine. Basedintest says: impossible! Why does no one call this stuff out?
>>24813674A thousand words a minute is not impossible.
>>24813674Pretty sure Noam Chomsky lied about something similar.
>>24814298yup.kim peek easily demonstrates this beyond a shadow of a doubt. far higher functioning savants than he exist with no diminishment of their abilities.
>>24813674I read around 500-600 wpm and don't think it would be absurd for someone to read twice as fast as me. The Neurological research that I'm familiar with implies that a small segment of the population is capable of reading 800+ wpm without any affect on comprehension. You're arguing from averages while trying to make claims about the existence of outliers.
>>24813681>>24814282Lol, you're defending literary critics and worshipping them as geniuses. Embarrassing.
people that read too fast don't remember anything they read
not to mention the vast number of those with complete eidetic memories, which even to a fault show the vast capacity of the mind to store reams of data seen only once.to OP, I suggest you simply accept you aren't one of those chosen geniuses and put your nose to the grindstone. Bloom for all his bluster couldn't write fiction to save his life. Hard work, endurance, slavish devotion, these can overwhelm genius. Except those who take it seriously, like Neumann or Tesla, or when regarding literature, Joyce or Shakespeare. Going up against them, you're fucked. But if you don't doltishly aim for the crown and instead opt to carve out your little niche, you might be surprised.
>>24814330you're so filthy with it, you're green.
If you leaf through Infinite Jest looking for something meaningful like you're trying to learn the plot points like who died or what the main conflict is then you're not going to have to bother to take very many notes, maybe that guy thinks he sped read it and knows the plot of the bock is nothing really happens the plot is inconsequential. Where most novels are a car that take you on a journey, Infinite Jest is a hedge maze designed to waste your time, in a corn field, in Nebraska, and there's nothing around, and you drove here in an old car that can extend the car analogy if you really like that.
In my opinion it's not important to read super quickly, it's not importantly about how quickly you can understand a book or dismiss it. It's about having a variety of viewpoints, so you'll never lament spending an endless amount of time on the wrong side of an argument.
>>24813674These people are just skimming the books.They aren't voicing the characters in their mind or rereading certain impactful sentences or paragraphs. You too could finish War and Peace in a few hours just by glancing at each page for 10 seconds to get the gist of the action and moving on.
>>24813674Art critics are worthless.
>>24813674I read about 75 pages an hour
>>24814506Ok
>>24813674Is it really reading if your just gobbling it up like a retard and claiming you're an almighty genius. It took an author ten years to write what some claim they've read in 10 hours, which to me is just pure autism.
I was in prison with Sonny Balwani and would speak with him daily. The guy could read a 300-500 page book in 2-4 hours and then discuss it with mastery. He was a professor at Stanford before Theranos so I knew he was beyond the average persons intelligence and abilities, but damn I wish I could read as quickly as he can. In prison I met several people who could knock out a long novel in a night. I read slow to enjoy the movie in my mind
>>24813674>>24815224Well how else can you be a literary critic at all? Reading a book like a love letter takes time. One wants to respect the work that went into a book that took a decade to write, but there are millions of books on earth, and even such a work is ultimately a mere drop in an ocean. If your job is to set up some kind of standard among books, then you'll need to read more than 50 in your lifetime, and that's going to involve taking some shortcuts.
>>24813674the problem with claims like these is that people say that its reasonably common for people to have absurd memory or reading speed but that they never really prove it or sit any tests or do anything to give them any amount of credibilityyou have posts like >>24813681 trying to embarrass you just for having some skepticism in something unproven, being unaware that skeptics are almost certainly smarter than the average person. hes probably just trolling though, but maybe wants to be one someday and doesnt want his dreams crushedyou also have posts like >>24814282 sucking some random chinese guys cock (you have to assume that hes jealous or something) just because he happens to be talented in something irrelevant to the thread and had parents that forced - some might say abused - him into nurturing said talentsthere are also posts like >>24814326. hes saying that he reads fast, but doesnt post anything on what he reads and how well he retains it. obviously anyone can look at a page for 1 second and flip it and say they read a 500 page book in less than 10 minutes, but this isnt impressive. he also says that hes familiar with research (didnt post it, unsurprisingly), and citing you being unfamiliar with how averages work. sure, some people read faster than the average but there is still a hard cap on how far from the average you can be. an example would be in sprinting. the average beginner sprinter will run 100 meters in 15 seconds, and the average reader will read 300ish wpm. the claim that someone can read 1000 wpm is as absurd as someone claiming that someone else can run 100 meters in less than 5 seconds>>24814336>complete eidetic memoriesthese arent real, nor are photographic memories. its been tested many times and rewards have been posted but never has someone sat a test and proved that they can remember literally everything they ever see or hear. again its true that some are above the average just like in all other things, but some claims are instantly dismissable without some incredibly hard evidence
>>24815382500-600 wpm isn't too unbelievable though. That's ~2pages per minute. Bloom is claiming more like 12-16 pages per minute.
>>24813674>do online test>score 220 wpm> comprehension>93%What do?
>>24813674>they, on average, can only retain approximately 50% of the information read.>implying most people retain even that while reading at a regular pace
>>24815429How do they determine how much they retain to arrive at the 50% figure? Because if it's a true/false test ...
>>24813674Bloom was a weirdo and an ultra-autist so I believe him desu
>>24815406Yah. Its bullshit. I imagine a person reading 5-6 hours a day, along with removing screen-based activities from their life, may increase their reading speed through sheer practice. But there is going to be an upper limit.
sure, when Bloom does it, he's a one in a million talent. but when OP finishes half a minute after putting it in, all of a sudden it's not so impressive. why do any of you fags care? jerking off about speed and efficiency is for soulless bugmen, and is the same spirit that pushes AI slop down everyone's throats>t. one sentence per hour enjoyer
>>24815454Yeah, even bloom would take his time while reading poetry. His speed reading was mostly done with news articles
>>24814336>the vast number of those with complete eidetic memoriesSo far as I know no one has been properly demonstrated to have one
>>24815382>>24813674it's definitely possible to speedread, especially if you practice it as a skill. It doesn't take a particular genius. Also with respect to OP, the term "pages" is indeterminate and can refer to 10x more content depending on the size of a page, to say nothing of genre. But the question is always, as >>24815454 mentions, what's the point? The point of great literature as Bloom himself puts it, is to invent the human being, to give depth and understanding to experience. Unanalyzed, unreflected experience is empty animalistic behaviour. That's what speedreading will always accomplish. At risk of sounding like a massive faggot, I personally prefer to read 1-2 pages of philosophy, or at most a chapter of fiction at a time, as the works I choose to engage with are exploding with meaning and inspire extensive thought. To do any more is to stuff my mind so much I cannot think
>>24813674”Reading speed” is something only non-serious readers boast about. Hamlet can be read in an afternoon, but I wouldn’t put any stock in the opinion of someone who has only dealt with the work for those few hours. Proper reading includes analyzing and reflecting, especially maximalist works like Infinite Jest. Even finishing it in a couple of weeks would be missing the point completely.
>>24813674When the entire schooling system regarding literature, specially college courses and MA programs, is built around dissecting the "themes" of books and students are made to read thousands of pages per week of dense books, then it's no surprise the literary ecosystem ends up filled with people who skim books. Most of the gatekeepers of the literary world don't really read in any meaningful sense of the word. It's also partly why things like feminism or post-colonial criticism and all that kind of stuff took such a strong hold on literature departments. They are clutches that help you coast it as a critic or even as a professor without having to ever properly engage with a book. It's all a scam.
>>24815475>von neumann>kim peek>even daniel tammet's bitch asssorry, but no.
>>24815382>absurd memory or reading speed but that they never really prove itpeople have no idea how much others lie. we have an entire generation of males simping after females who don't even read the books they say they do (at most they read summaries), with their brand being just buying books for display purposes.
>>24813674I can read at 250 wpm if I'm tryharding and reading non fiction, but I find 150-200 to be a lot more enjoyable. I don't understand why people want to speed read fiction.
>>24813674There's a difference between skimming and reading. When I realize something is wasting my time with loads of unnecessary filler, I begin skimming. The easiest way involves reading only the first and last sentence of each paragraph. You'd be surprised at how effective this is. But I would never claim to have read and understood everything after skimming in this manner. I would say only that I got the gist of it. Normies love to gloat about scores, especially how many books they've read in a year. The idea that someone spent a whole year reading just one book sets them on edge. No! How could I have spent so much time on just one book?! Samantha read 50 books in that same time frame! Maybe stop measuring your intelligence with how many paperbacks you can rip through. Maybe start valuing what you take away from books. Stop engaging in normie dick measuring contests.
>>24813696I don't read books because what if my thoughts are more original than theirs ahh opinion
>>24814298For several hours straight, though?
>>24817925>Normies love to gloat about scores, especially how many books they've read in a year. The idea that someone spent a whole year reading just one book sets them on edge. No! How could I have spent so much time on just one book?! Samantha read 50 books in that same time frame! Maybe stop measuring your intelligence with how many paperbacks you can rip through. Maybe start valuing what you take away from books. Stop engaging in normie dick measuring contests.This is such a cope. Any /fit/izen can tell you there's something to be said for building a consistent habit and seeing the numbers go up. Can't stand the "b b b b but they don't connect with the books as meaningfully as I do with my 3 books a year" attitude. You don't know that.
>>24814360I like this analogy, since it would involve looking at highway billboard ads advertising the hedge maze itself for the whole 3 hour journey there and back."You still have time to turn back!", reads the billboard ad at 167th km of the return trip home after being severely disappointed and utterly confused.I appreciate Infinite Jest solely for the reason it's inherently written to cockblock le epic bacon book connoisseurs that pride themselves on swallowing X books per day/week/month
>>24818088You realize it was written before bacon memes, reddit, good reads goals were a thing, right?
>>24817925>>24818084Taking your time is good but after a certain point it does become clear that you're just retarded and unable to generate good ideas within a reasonable timeline. Three books a year is ridiculous.
>>24818110Anon has the reading comprehension of a dead rat
>>24813674The fixation on “retain” is so fucking hilarious to me. I’d love to sit you people down and run through retention tests over a day, week, month and year. Take 100 hours trying to “retain” everything in Infinite Jest. Your own brain is constantly categorizing information in a big trash bin. What’s “retained” is increasingly distorted and coloured over time. A big part of why you think that book you reread changed so much isn’t that you grew older it’s that you didn’t fucking remember the book in the first place. It was just an impressionist painting saying “that was the shit”. >but people remember thingsSure. Not by reading slowly. By prompting the memory over and over, by constantly being quizzed on the particulars. Make the neurons fire. What does that mean for literature? If you teach a class on the same book year after year you are likely to retain a lot of it. Even then people grow complacent and you can no doubt trip them up. Alternative two; fixate on the book over years, memorize it by constant repetiton in the vein of old oral performances (the Homer way). Except we also know oral cultures don’t actually keep a story straight. They constantly change it while keeping a handful of particulars. You’re chasing a fucking mirage of perfection while experiencing a tenth of the books other readers do. You never actually trial your supposed skill.
>>24817906Adhd brain
>>24817925I wont i skimmed through you argument and agree that dick measuring is problematic. Idk thats all I got
>>24813674>Bloom>SchneiderJews
