It’s nearly that time again! Today’s actually even worse.

It’s 10:42 PM, and I’m just about to head home. I’ve got a real, full 140 pages to read tonight and I won’t begin until I’m home, which means around 11:15, and also that there’s a higher chance I’ll fall asleep instead of finish. Good luck, me.

I’m finally home and settled in enough to read. It’s so windy and amazing outside! The bad news is that it’s 11:37. Reading time! God Particle first, because it’s the hardest. I paused to set up a playlist and that took five minutes somehow. 11:42!

Oh my gosh. This is why I’m learning to speed read. I just finished 40 pages of The God Particle, and it’s 1:33 AM. I did nothing but read continuously for 110 minutes — that’s 165 seconds per page. At about 440 words per page, that’s .375 seconds per word, or 2.67 words per second; 160 words per minute. Enough berating myself for reading slowly: why did this happen?  Well, I’m very darn tired. This book also hit its most interesting parts! Lederman is talking about the formation of the standard model now, which he played some parts in. He’s talked about Feynman a bit, and he’s generally discussing quarks and how they were discovered and why they were proposed. It’s very cool — but I just read it instead of scanning over it!

After a long while of doing it and seeing my horrific time, I decided to keep going at a normal pace to see if my eyes would feel better than after speed reading. I can now safely report that they do not. It’s 1:42. Finished to page 246 of Ringworld at 2:16 AM – 34 minutes for 40 pages. Not great! I started off very fast, but slowed toward the end. In this passage, They came across the great floating tower, stayed in it, met some natives, got burned by their translator discs, found the enormous eye of god, and flew through it.

2:18 AM and starting Buddhism Plain and Simple. Finished at 2:33 — but I got next to zero comprehension out of it. I think my reading capacity is pretty much shot for the evening — a little over 120 pages down though! Sorry, Red Mars, I’ll get to you tomorrow.