John Miedema

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After a pressured day in his world of advertising there seemed to be no solution to the problems thrashing around in the head of Sydney Piddington. In The Special Joys of Super-Slow Reading, Piddington (1973) recounted his decision to relax by spending three hours on two chapters of a book, “I lost myself in the author’s world, living his book. And when I finally put it down, my mind was totally refreshed.” (157). Ironically, this article was published in Reader’s Digest. On the back flap was an advertisement for the magazine’s condensed books: “To every Miss, Mrs. And Ms. who has no time to read – READ THIS!” Piddington understood what his publishers did not, that slowing down is essential in the rush of modern culture.

Honoré (2004) is the author of the book, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed. He documented the beginning of the Slow Movement with the creation of the Slow Food, an organization to protest fast food. The idea has been applied other areas, including slow housing, slow exercise, slow work, slow sex, and slow reading. Honoré’s interest in the Slow Movement began one day in an airport when he saw a book called The One-Minute Bedtime Story. At first it struck him as brilliant — the cure to his nightly tug-of-war with his son’s demands for more stories — then the absurdity of his fast lifestyle called him to his senses. The idea of the slow movement is not that everything should be done as slowly as possible, but that our obsession with speed has turned into an addiction. “When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.” Slow reading is one good technique.

The context of the Slow Movement helps clarify the voluntary aspect in VSR. People are choosing to read slowly as a form of relief from the seemingly unstoppable acceleration of our culture. As Jennings (2005) reported, people are living on the edge of exhaustion. “The price for constant speed is high, whether measured in money or human lives.” (12). Or as Kumar (cited in Ingle, 2004) said, “We are so busy all the time that we have become human doings rather than human beings.” Both recommend slow reading as a good technique to slow down.

Waters (2006) declared a worldwide reading crisis resulting from our global push toward productivity. Young children are learning to read faster, skipping phonetics and diagramming sentences; these children will not grow up to read Milton. She predicted the end of graduate English literature programs:

There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines.

She advised re-introducing time into reading, “People are trying slow eating. Why not slow reading?”

References

Honoré, Carl (2004). In praise of slow: How a worldwide movement is changing the cult of speed. Vintage Canada.

Ingle, Roisin (2004, March 26). What’s the rush? The Irish Times, p. 15.

Jennings, Lane (2005). Slow is beautiful: Living as if life really mattered. The Futurist, 39(2), pp. 12-13.

Piddington, Sydney (1973, June). The special joys of super-slow reading. Reader’s Digest, 102(614).

Waters, Lindsay (2007). Time for reading, Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(23).