>>25636745
Hegel

>>25636745
By simply not reading.

demented looking fella, is he fully sane

>>25636745
He is homosexual, by the way. One of those old timey, non-feminine, homos.

I only read when sober

>>25636745
>structuring your reading to not end up like him
Dudebro behaviour

>>25636745
well I flip through 1500 pages an hour, 25 hours a day. I call it super speed reading.
Ask me anything. I couldn't quote a single line.

>>25636745
He also maintains that Caesar didn't really write his book on Gaul or anything really. Rather, Julius Caesar was a lucky but largely unrefined boob who intimidated people to say good things about his writings and had ghost writers.

>>25636745
I watched 2 (two) videos of this guy and in both of them he made out with his dog. He definitely fucks that poor animal

>>25636807
seek help buddy

What's his channel name?

>>25636895
Steve Donoghue.
He sleeps 1.5 hours a day.
His favorite authors are Herodotos and Homer.
He hates Ulysses, Infinite Jest, McCarthy.

the fact that he thought the passage from moby dick where the guy who requests to be called ishmael says "i believe a whale is a fish because that's what is says in the bible" meant that melville thought whales were fishes. extremely stupid shithead who can't read.

>>25636745
>150 pages an hour
>10 hours a day
>still somehow hasn't finished reading a book

The funniest thing about Donoghue is that he's apparently turned reading into a factory job. At some point you have to wonder whether he actually likes books or just enjoys being able to say he's read them? Although I suppose reading 4000 books and understanding 12 is still a better ratio than most of /lit/. There's something very funny about treating literature like an enormous backlog of administrative paperwork that needs to be cleared before the end of the financial year. Imagine finishing Moby Dick and immediately having to clock in for Herodotus. No time to think about anything, obviously, there's another 600 pages waiting. And the weirdest part is that he seems to have developed incredibly strong opinions about what constitutes good literature despite apparently regarding the actual experience of reading as an obstacle to getting through literature. It's like reviewing restaurants based on how quickly you can eat the menu. I don't even particularly care if someone reads slowly or quickly, but surely at some point the books are supposed to be the point? Otherwise you might as well just start collecting ISBN numbers and save yourself the trouble. I imagine him waking up in the morning with a production target. 1,500 pages by lunch, 1,500 more before dinner. Somewhere in the background there's a little bell that rings whenever he finishes a chapter. His family are forbidden from speaking to him because he's currently behind schedule on the Greeks. The real tragedy is that there's no conceivable endpoint to this. Eventually you've read every book and what have you actually accomplished? You can now die knowing that you have personally converted several hundred thousand pages of printed paper into a vague recollection that a man named Ishmael was involved in something nautical. At this point I don't think he needs a reading list. He needs a union representative. And perhaps this is unfair, but I suspect that if you took away the ability to announce how many books he'd read, his enthusiasm for the activity would collapse within a fortnight. The man seems to have mistaken the accumulation of literary experiences for having a literary sensibility. There's also something wonderfully perverse about reading Homer at industrial speeds. Imagine being Homer and discovering that several thousand years later some American fellow is treating your life's work like a shipment of Amazon parcels that needs signing off before 5 PM. Anyway, I'm sure he's a perfectly nice bloke.

I just don't understand why anyone would voluntarily turn one of the few activities that doesn't have to be productive into another job. And what happens to the books after they've been processed? Does he ever revisit them? Does he have some enormous warehouse somewhere containing the memories of 4000 books, all stacked on top of each other, slowly gathering dust? Occasionally he'll pull one out and discover that he remembers the title, the author's nationality and approximately three adjectives from a review he once read, but absolutely nothing about the actual contents. I wonder if he has ever accidentally read the same book twice without noticing. Imagine getting halfway through War and Peace, thinking you've made excellent progress, only to discover that you've already read it six months ago. Absolute production nightmare. Somebody in the literary department is getting fired. There must also be a hierarchy of books that are particularly useful for maintaining these numbers. You probably want something with short chapters, generous margins and plenty of dialogue. Imagine having to read Finnegans Wake under these conditions. You'd need industrial equipment. A forklift for the footnotes. A team of accountants to work out whether you've technically finished a page. And what about rereading? Is that permitted? Does it count towards the annual total? If I read the first chapter of Brothers Karamazov twice, have I read one book or two chapters? These are important questions for the modern literary worker. I also find the idea of speedreading Homer particularly amusing because the entire point of an oral epic is presumably that somebody is supposed to be telling you a story. There are repetitions, digressions, descriptions, formal patterns, all sorts of things that make the experience what it is. But apparently the correct approach is to treat the Odyssey like an unusually long terms and conditions agreement. Imagine Achilles arriving at the gates of Troy only to discover that the reader has already moved on to Herodotus because the quarterly targets are looking a bit disappointing. And I don't mean to single out Donoghue here, because the entire culture of literary consumption seems to have become infected with this peculiar accounting mentality. Goodreads has probably done irreversible damage to people's ability to enjoy books. Everyone has a little scoreboard in their head. Number of books read this year. Number of pages read this month. Number of classics completed. It's all very impressive until you ask someone what they actually thought about something and they start looking at you like you've asked them to perform an emergency appendectomy. I suspect there are people who have read every major Russian novelist and would struggle to explain what they actually like about Russian literature. They've completed the pilgrimage, collected the stamps and returned home without ever looking at the scenery.

The funniest possible outcome would be for Donoghue to eventually reach some sort of terminal literary enlightenment, having read absolutely everything, and discover that his favourite book is still something he read when he was fourteen. Ten thousand books later, the entire enterprise has brought him back to the beginning.

Somewhere in a university library a copy of The Hobbit is quietly waiting for its revenge. Actually, I think we should start measuring literary achievement in the opposite direction. How few books can you read while still having something interesting to say? There should be an award for someone who reads three books in an entire year and actually remembers all three. Give them a medal. Put them on television. Have the Nobel committee investigate. Meanwhile Donoghue can continue operating the literary equivalent of a textile mill, producing enormous quantities of finished reading with absolutely no shortage of raw material. I hope the books are at least being paid overtime.

I wonder if there's a point at which the reading speed starts to become counterproductive in a purely mechanical sense. Presumably the eyes are still moving across the page, but is the brain actually receiving anything? Or is there some sort of literary buffering process where the information arrives several days later, after the next 14 books have already been consumed? Maybe he wakes up in the middle of the night remembering a sentence from Proust and briefly experiences an emotion in cold sweat before immediately forgetting it and tumbling out of bed to fill his dogs water dish or something..

I would love to see his actual reading setup. Some kind of enormous command centre with several book stands attached to enormous wheels, each displaying a different book. A conveyor belt feeds paperbacks into the room. There's a large illuminated map of Europe showing which national literatures have been sufficiently processed. A little red light flashes whenever he falls behind on the French. The assistants are probably very stressed. "Sir, we've got a backlog of 19th-century Russians." "Put them through." "But sir, you've already got three Dostoevskys in progress." "I said PUT THEM THROUGH." At some point the distinction between reading and inventory management disappears entirely. And what happens when he encounters a genuinely difficult passage? Does he stop? Does he reread it? Or does he simply maintain eye contact with the paragraph until it agrees to be understood? I imagine a particularly troublesome sentence in Ulysses being escorted out of the building by security after refusing to cooperate with the production schedule. The whole thing also raises the question of what literary criticism is supposed to accomplish. If you've read 4000 books, surely you should have something interesting to say about the experience of reading them. But what if all you have is a list of opinions? What if the books have become interchangeable containers for judgements that were already formed before you opened them?

You could probably replace half the library with coloured index cards saying GOOD, BAD, IMPORTANT, OVERRATED and save yourself a tremendous amount of time. And there's something quite tragic about the prospect of someone spending ten hours a day reading and never having enough time to actually become bored. Boredom is underrated. Sometimes you need to sit around thinking about a book for an afternoon, wondering whether you misunderstood something, or whether the author was simply talking nonsense. Sometimes you need to put a book down and go for a walk. Sometimes you need to stare at a tree for twenty minutes. These are perfectly legitimate literary activities, even if they don't count towards the Goodreads annual challenge. Perhaps that's the real difference between reading and processing. Reading leaves room for the possibility that something might happen to you. Processing is concerned exclusively with what happens to the material. I also wonder whether there's a point at which the books begin to resent him. Imagine being a 700-page novel, having spent five years being written, edited, revised and printed, only to be granted approximately four hours of someone's attention before being deposited in the completed pile. You might reasonably feel a little underappreciated.

Tolstoy is probably spinning in his grave at several thousand Russian revolutions per minute. Not because someone dislikes his novels, but because the poor man has apparently become a unit of measurement. One day I hope someone interviews Donoghue and asks him what he thinks about a particular book, and he just starts reciting the publication history, the author's biography, the number of editions and the critical reception. The interviewer asks whether he enjoyed it. Silence. Somewhere in the distance, a factory whistle blows. I genuinely think there should be a new literary movement dedicated to doing absolutely nothing. No reading challenges, no canonical obligations, no yearly targets, no discussions about whether you're sufficiently cultured. Just one person, one book, an unreasonable amount of tea and the possibility that they might not finish it. Call it the anti-speedreading movement. Our manifesto will be three pages long, although we expect most adherents to take several months to get through it. Our first official recommendation is that everyone stop reading for ten minutes and think about what they've just read.

Donoghue is exempt, obviously. He's got a shipment of Greek literature arriving on Thursday. I suspect Donoghue would be absolutely horrified by the anti-speedreading movement. Imagine discovering that an entire literary movement has emerged whose central philosophical principle is that you should occasionally put the book down and go outside. He'd probably write a 900-word denunciation explaining why this is an intellectually bankrupt position, having read the manifesto at 300 pages an hour and completely missed the joke.

I can already imagine his review.

>"An intellectually negligible group of internet malcontents has recently proposed that readers should spend less time reading. Their central contention appears to be that books are somehow best appreciated through prolonged inactivity, which is an extraordinary proposition given that books are, by definition, objects containing written words. Huhuhu *slobbery french kissed dog gaze*"

And then he'd spend four paragraphs explaining that the movement has failed to account for the historical development of the novel. We would respond by publishing a second manifesto, consisting entirely of a photograph of a comfortable chair.

>"Although the chair is competently constructed, its intellectual ambitions are minimal. There is no evidence that its designers intended to engage with the great questions of human existence."

At this point we'd have to introduce the position of Minister for Sitting Down, whose sole responsibility would be to sit down and refuse to elaborate. Eventually I imagine him attempting to infiltrate the movement. He'd arrive at one of our meetings carrying a stack of 19th-century novels, announce that he's read them all, and demand to know which authors we've included in our programme. We'd explain that there is no programme. He'd ask for a reading list. We'd give him a blank sheet of paper. This would probably make him furious. The movement would also have a strict prohibition on discussing how many books its members have read. Anyone caught mentioning their annual Goodreads total would be required to spend an afternoon looking at a pond. Repeat offenders would be sent to the countryside with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and instructions to return only when they've forgotten what page they're on. Our most radical proposal would be the introduction of the unfinished book as a legitimate literary category. A book abandoned after 37 pages would be considered a perfectly respectable intellectual experience. Indeed, we would argue that abandoning a book can sometimes be a more sophisticated response to it than forcing yourself through another 600 pages out of cultural obligation. Naturally, Donoghue would regard this as an attack on civilisation. He'd probably produce a list of 50 books that everyone should read before being permitted to comment on the subject. We'd read the list slowly, decide that it looks rather long, and then go back to sitting in our chairs.

>>25636745
that's cool, i read on average ~1000 pages an hour by having AI summarize it for me, which is far more efficient, and i believe br*tish people belong at the bottom of the sea living in spongebob's realm

There would eventually be a schism within the movement. The more radical faction would argue that even sitting in a chair is too productive, and that the ultimate literary experience consists of lying on the floor with a book resting somewhere nearby. The moderates would insist that one should at least occasionally open the book. This disagreement would produce several bitter pamphlets, none of which would be longer than a paragraph. Meanwhile, Donoghue would be working on his definitive 800-video response to the movement, despite the fact that it had existed for approximately eleven days and had only seven members. The final irony is that he might actually become our greatest literary critic. After all, if there's one person capable of moaning extensively about a movement without understanding its central premise, he's probably uniquely qualified for that. We would dedicate our first collected edition to him.

The dedication would read:

>"To Steve Donoghue, who taught us that the greatest tragedy in literature is not an unread book, but a book that has been read without anyone noticing."

We'd send him a complimentary copy. He'd read it in 47 minutes, give it one star, and move on to reading Cicero's letters for the hundredth time. And thus the movement would achieve its first and only real success: producing a book that its dedicatee had actually read.

I suspect the Romans would have been particularly useful to Donoghue in his campaign against us. He could probably find some obscure passage in Cicero explaining that the decline of reading discipline is symptomatic of the general collapse of Roman virtue, and then spend an afternoon informing us that our movement represents everything wrong with the modern world. I imagine him taking on the role of Cato the Elder, standing in the Roman Forum and demanding that the anti-speedreading movement be destroyed before it corrupts another generation. "Furthermore, I believe that the movement must be abolished." Carthago delenda est, except Carthage has been replaced by a man sitting in a garden reading two pages of Virgil. He'd probably approve of Caesar's reading habits, assuming Caesar maintained a similarly impressive daily output. I can imagine him admiring the Commentarii de Bello Gallico as the ultimate example of efficient literary production: concise, informative, no unnecessary emotional indulgence, and conveniently written by a man who was too busy conquering Gaul to spend six months contemplating a paragraph. Meanwhile, we'd be sitting around trying to work out whether Caesar actually enjoyed writing it. Perhaps we'd introduce a new branch of the movement dedicated to the appreciation of Roman leisure. Call it Otium. The central principle would be that a civilised person should occasionally do absolutely nothing, preferably in a garden, while thinking about something that has no practical application whatsoever. Donoghue would hate this, naturally. He'd probably remind us that otium was a complex concept in Roman intellectual life and that we were oversimplifying it. We'd agree, thank him for the lecture, and continue doing nothing. The situation would become especially awkward when we discovered that Seneca had already written extensively about the importance of using one's time wisely. Donoghue would immediately claim him as an intellectual ally. We'd point out that Seneca also thought people should stop wasting their lives on pointless activity. He'd insist that this is not what Seneca meant. We'd ask whether he had considered spending an afternoon not reading Seneca. At some point he'd probably produce Pliny the Elder as evidence that serious intellectuals should never stop accumulating knowledge. We'd counter that Pliny died during the eruption of Vesuvius, which seems like an unfortunate occupational hazard for someone who couldn't resist going to investigate something interesting. Imagine the movement's official Roman patron being Horace. Our motto would be carpe diem, although we'd interpret this as meaning that you should stop worrying about finishing the Aeneid and go have lunch.

Donoghue would object that Horace's literary achievements cannot be reduced to an excuse for laziness. We'd explain that nobody was reducing his literary achievements. We were simply having lunch. He'd probably write a lengthy defence of Virgil, explaining that the Aeneid represents the culmination of Roman literary culture and that anyone who hasn't read it in its entirety is fundamentally unqualified to discuss Latin literature.

We'd respond by announcing that our new honorary member is the man who read the first three books of the Aeneid, decided he'd had enough, and went fishing. This would be considered a tremendous intellectual achievement. The movement would eventually establish a Roman chapter, complete with togas, wine and a strict prohibition on discussing the number of books anyone has read. Members would gather in a villa, recline on couches and occasionally quote Lucretius. The only requirement for membership would be that you must have abandoned at least one book without feeling guilty about it. Donoghue would undoubtedly regard this as a grotesque misunderstanding of classical civilisation. He'd probably explain that the Romans were extraordinarily serious about education, rhetoric, philosophy and literary culture. We'd point out that they also spent quite a lot of time eating, drinking, gossiping, arguing about politics and murdering each other. He'd probably insist that these activities have nothing to do with the literary tradition. At which point we'd nominate Petronius as our patron saint. Actually, I think the movement should commission a new translation of the Satyricon. Not because anyone particularly needs another translation, but because I want to see Donoghue explain why a group of people who spend their afternoons doing nothing have somehow managed to produce a more convincing appreciation of Roman literature than someone who has read every Roman author at least twice.

We could even establish a special award named after Pliny the Elder. It would be awarded annually to the person who has read the fewest books while managing to have the most interesting conversation about one of them. The inaugural award would go to a retired man in Norfolk who read The Old Man and the Sea in 1974 and hasn't felt the need to read anything since. Donoghue would appeal the decision on procedural grounds. We would reject the appeal on the grounds that the committee had gone outside to enjoy the sunshine and would not be returning until Monday. I think that's ultimately where the Romans would have to come down on this question. Not whether one has read every surviving Latin author, but whether one has actually managed to live a life in which reading is one of the pleasures rather than the entire administrative burden. Unfortunately, by the time Donoghue finishes explaining this to us, we'll all have died of old age. But at least we'll have had a nice afternoon.


The Anti-Speedreading Movement has now entered its second phase, following an emergency conference in which delegates unanimously agreed that the original campaign had become too focused on one individual and insufficiently concerned with the broader civilisational implications of reading books at an unreasonable pace. The movement has established its headquarters in a disused municipal library, where all clocks have been removed. Members are required to sit quietly for at least twenty minutes before being permitted to open a book. This is known as the Preliminary Period of Intellectual Acclimatisation, although dissenters have already begun referring to it as the Twenty Minutes of Doing Absolutely Nothing.

The movement's founding document, De Legendo Contra Horologium, was composed over eleven months by a committee of seven men who have collectively read approximately fourteen pages since its inception. It contains the following principal declarations:
>A book is not a unit of measurement.
>Finishing a book does not constitute an intellectual achievement in itself.
>Reading the same paragraph twice is not a disciplinary failure.
>Nobody is obliged to finish Herodotus.
>The phrase "I've read 200 books this year" shall henceforth be treated as an admission of administrative misconduct.
There has also been considerable disagreement over the movement's relationship with classical antiquity.
One faction, styling itself the Ciceronian Tendency, argues that the Romans understood reading as a fundamentally civic activity. They point out that Cicero frequently revisited philosophical questions, corresponded extensively with friends, and regarded intellectual cultivation as something inseparable from the development of judgment. Their position is that the modern speedreader would have been incapable of participating in Roman public life because he would have spent the entire Senate session trying to get through the minutes. The opposing faction, the Catonian Purists, maintains that Cato the Elder would have considered the entire movement decadent. They argue that Cato would have instructed everyone to stop reading Greek literature, return to agriculture, and perhaps occasionally read something useful about cabbage cultivation. Their proposed slogan is Ceterum censeo velocilectionem esse delendam. Meanwhile, the movement has experienced its first major internal scandal. A prominent member was discovered to have finished three books in a single weekend. He initially claimed that he had simply been enjoying himself, but subsequent investigations revealed that he had been reading during meals, on public transport, and, most damningly, while waiting for a kettle to boil. He was immediately summoned before the Committee for Suspiciously Efficient Literary Consumption. His defence was that the books were quite short. The committee rejected this argument, noting that the question was not how many pages a book contained but whether the reader had demonstrated an appropriate degree of contemplative hesitation. He has since been expelled.

The movement has also begun issuing official reading certificates. These are awarded according to the following classifications:

- Novice: Has read a book without checking how many pages remain.
- Adept: Has spent an entire afternoon on a single chapter.
- Master: Has forgotten what he originally intended to look up because he became distracted by a footnote.
- Grand Master: Has owned The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for seventeen years and maintains that he is getting around to it.

The Grand Master qualification is particularly prestigious, as it demonstrates an advanced understanding of the distinction between intellectual aspiration and actual literary consumption.

There are rumours of a schism developing over Virgil. The Orthodox faction insists that the Aeneid should be read over several months, with adequate time allocated for reflection on the political and literary implications of each book. The Radical Slow Reading Caucus, however, proposes that one should spend an entire year on the first six lines. A particularly extreme delegate has suggested that the opening word, Arma, deserves a minimum of three weeks. Nobody has yet challenged him.

The movement's most ambitious project is the establishment of an annual literary festival called The Unfinished Book Fair. Visitors will be invited to bring books they have started but never completed. There will be no authors signing copies, no panel discussions, no book launches, and absolutely no competitions. The principal attraction will be a large room containing several hundred comfortable chairs, each occupied by someone reading the same book at a different pace. At the end of the festival, a committee will announce that nobody has finished anything and that the event has therefore been an overwhelming success.

The movement's current motto, adopted after a particularly heated thirty-three-hour debate, is:

Festina lente.
>Make haste slowly.

It is understood that the committee took another six weeks to agree on the punctuation.

And so the Anti-Speedreading Movement approaches its inevitable confrontation with the broader literary establishment. Its members have made peace with obscurity, unfinished books, and the possibility that they may never understand everything they read. They have rejected the cult of accumulation and rediscovered the ancient proposition that the purpose of reading is not to have read, but to become, in some small measure, a different person through the encounter. Rome had its triumphs. Greece had its philosophers. The medieval monasteries had their patient copyists. Every civilisation, in its own fashion, understood that the preservation of intellectual life required something more than the mechanical reproduction of information. And now, in our enlightened age, we have the spectacle of a man racing through the entire literary inheritance of Western civilisation as though the barbarians were approaching and he alone had been entrusted with saving the books by reading them before they burned. Let him have his numbers. Let him have his annual totals, his shelves of completed volumes, his encyclopaedic recollections of authors whose works he has barely had time to inhabit. Let him announce that he has conquered Tacitus, dispatched Suetonius, and disposed of Livy before breakfast. The movement does not begrudge him his victories. It merely observes that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in less time than it takes to read the Gallic Wars, and yet somehow managed to leave a rather more substantial impression on European history.

Veni, vidi, volui legere.

>We came. We saw. We WISHED to R E A D.
And then we sat down.

The meeting is adjourned.

>>25636745
who the fuck cares man

>>25636930
>He hates Ulysses, Infinite Jest, McCarthy.
Sensible positions.

>>25636745
I have long considered him an arch enemy, he is a charlatan par excellence, probably would be insufferable to be around. I remember him saying that every single translation of Dante is bad and the only way he could enjoy it was by 'reading the original' he can't read Italian... He once said Aristotle 'broke the cardinal rule of philosophy, sacrificing readability' He of course made that rule up himself and it sort of goes to show exactly how retarded he is. He is a serious negative example who should show us all how to be better, less pretentious, and less retarded.

>>25636758
that usually just means they were molested as a child.

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>>25638310
wake me up when he hates tolstoevsky

>>25636745
sounds like he used to have a substance abuse problem

>>25638319
And yet it is criminal? Someone tell Plato.

>>25636745
i mean people are circlejerking the same 15 authors in aeternum on this board, so naturally they are gonna hate somebody who has actually read widely.

>>25636758
every anglo is a homo.

>>25636745
take time to contemplate works. Never fucking say anything for the first month or so. Let yourself absorb the book.

>>25636745
philosophy is only a waste of time if you're too stupid to get it

>>25638254
>>25638259
>>25638262
>>25638266
>>25638270
I'm fucking dying over here man.

>>25638254
He could have read this entire post chain in about ten seconds.

>>25636745
i am incapable of speed reading. my brain can't comprehend what i am reading when i speed-read

I don't read philosophy, I think it's a waste of time

existentialist philosophers are the worst.

kirkegaard
camus
sartre
debord(guy who wrote society of the spectacle)

i hate these guys. They are more nonsensical than religious philosophers

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>>25640614
they are religious philosophers

plato is the only philosopher you need to read desu

>>25638794
How did I not see it before

Sir you have opened my eyes to a new world, now it all makes sense.

>>25636828
He right and you’re a homo
you seek help, faggot

>>25640642
all in a day's work for Captain Obvious. farewell, citizen.

dictionary
encyclopedia
bible

these are probably the only things you need to read desu

>>25636745
>thinks all philosophy is a waste of time
not really indefensible at all

>>25640856
By that logic, so is art you fucking retard.

>>25640553
Those posts look like 30mg of Adderall at least

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>>25638254

>>25641042
Top kek

>>25640856
It's just really funny to imagine someone who could "speedread" War & Peace in one sitting thinking anything else is a waste of time. Painting with this broad of a brush after spending, what, 60 years of your life reading is retarded

I've read 2000+ chapter, 5 million word websloppas in 2 weeks

>>25638794
I think you're a homo, Pierre.