OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.”
The promise of speed reading — to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension — can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them.
I seem to remember at school there were extra curricular lessons in speed reading. Several boys claimed to be speed readers.
I was always getting in trouble in grade school because I would finish reading well before everyone else and the teacher thought I was goofing off. Very frustrating and one of the reasons I hated school so much.