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.

It’s 11:00:30 PM, I’m sitting at work, it’s raining outside, and I have 160 pages to read.

Okay, not quite 160 — really just 133 pages. I’ll finish Time To Go House tonight. The key is speed reading. If I’m reading properly, I should be able to read the approximately 80,000 words in front of me (at a high count) in 80-100 minutes. It’s 11:03 – away I go.

11:23:40 and I just got to page 204 of Ringworld. Big arguments and starseed lures and evolutionary control! This is one of my favourite parts of the book. And the sunflowers got poor Speaker-to-animals. Everyone gets angry at Nessus because they figure out that the puppeteers interfered greatly in the evolution of humankind and the kzin. They all feel ashamed that they’d been so manipulated so easily, and through this passage, deal with it. Nessus is off on his own somewhere, terrified that they’ll all try to kill him over it, and Speaker-to-Animals gets seriously burned by an invasive strain of photoreflective sunflowers.

11:28 and it’s time to start the hardest bit of my reading: The God Particle. My eyes are already a little sore.  11:58 and I’m done – that’s definitely a harder read! Finished off to page 274. This was the continuation of the description of how particle accelerators operate, some design choices made in making them (electrons, protons, colliding beam, straight vs circular, etc) and then it became all about the discovery that symmetry is broken, with a thrilling blow-by-blow account, given by the author as an actor in the discovery. Pretty cool stuff.

Next up: finishing Time To Go House. It’s 12:03 and I’m off — only 17 pages to read. Done at 12:14. It got pretty preachy there for a bit about the Vietnam war, but I can’t really blame the author. I had a good nostalgia moment reading about the food along the side of the table, the mouse-dance, the stair game, and lining Smalleata’s house. I’m glad to have had a chance to re-read this, even at lightning pace.

Last but certainly not least: Red Mars. I haven’t read this before; it’s fiction and it seems reasonably dense, but I’m very strongly interested (and I read the first 25 pages a week or so ago, they were great). Hoping to get 40 pages done to take me to page 63, in the next 23 minutes or so (that’ll round it out at about 100 minutes with some breaks). Quick note a minute or two later: italicized text (which there’s a few pages of at the beginning of the chapter) is very hard to read quickly.

12:28 was when I started, and 1:18 is when I finished! It’s as I feared: this book is too interesting! I lapsed very seriously into slow reading — that’s 50 minutes on 40 pages, when it should have been 20. I had read 20 pages in about 15 minutes, so I wasn’t far off track at the start. Beyond it being interesting, it’s also late at night, and this was the tail end of the reading — as I know from last week, spreading the reading out (and doing it earlier in the day) is important.

Anyway. This was a step back in time to before the opening events of the book, describing the initial journey from earth to Mars. It’s touching on the politics, the people, religion, all sorts of things. I’m never sure I trust Kim Stanley Robinson’s descriptions of vast groups of people, but for the sake of fiction I can accept them. Provided I can speed it up a bit, this will be an interesting read. My only real complaints are the occasional burst of italics and some sections that seemed to regurgitate earlier points over and over. Lots of writers do that (I mean, hey, just read these blog posts), but I would expect it to get pruned by editors to the point that a reader wouldn’t notice it. Maybe it’s just because I’m purposely speed reading? Ha!

Good reading. Have to start before 11:00 PM tomorrow! Very, very glad I got back into the swing of read-and-blog, and accomplished near to my goal of 160 pages. All said and done, it took 140 minutes instead of 100, and I probably spent 20 minutes of that time writing / rubbing my eyes, so it wasn’t a bad effort.

This weekend I travelled to a muskoka campground along with most of my coworkers. We slept in cottages, kayaked, canoed, played sports, played poker, and had a lot of fun. I tried to do a tiny bit of reading, but the real world was just more compelling.

Personal highlights of the weekend were losing huge on a single hand of poker, lone canoeing around the t-shirt island, perfectly roasted marshmallows, and stopping to see some falls in Bracebridge.

Anyway, starting today I plan to read 40 pages of each of 4 books, every day.

Yesterday was a crazy long and busy day. I know! I say that fairly often, but this was actually a pretty busy, wild day. I managed to read 60 pages of Ringworld and 60 pages of Time To Go House, but I fell asleep twice after hitting page 120 on Time To Go House, so I didn’t stay up to write this post or to try to read The God Particle.

Today then, I have 60 pages of The God Particle to read, 30 of Ringworld, and I’ll finish Time To Go House (it’s only 137 pages), so I’ll have 13 pages or so to read of another book. I think I’ll switch over to Red Mars, because I feel like my comprehension has climbed high enough that I’m able to speed-read it.

I’ve hit a weird spot in the speed reading; I stopped doing 2 fixtures per line and started just looking at the entire line; I feel like I miss words around the edges more often, but not doing a crazy zig-zag pattern with my eyes is far less tiring, can be done much faster, and through its stability allows me to “take in” 2-3 lines at once. I think I’ll continue this way — the bad side is that I’ve slowed down, because I’m no longer looking to a specific anchor like “1/3rd through a line”, so my eyes won’t pick up data unless I try really hard to focus as I scan past. So that’s progress, but I need to do better not to fall asleep!

To make sure I wouldn’t fall asleep yesterday, I stayed in the subway stations for a bit to read – I got through my entire ringworld reading sitting on a bench at College, and then I stopped at Bathurst just to read a bunch of the Time To Go House. By the time I got home I was quite tired (and it was quite late), but I already had most of my work finished. It was a really effective way to stagger my reading a bit, and to keep myself from getting into that sleepy thought-pattern before I had enough of my work done.

The God Particle

didn’t read any today!

Ringworld

They flew, they crashed, they argued, Teela got hurt a little bit, they started flying their flycycles (which are pretty cool — remind me a little of this), and Teela went plateau crazy, so they swooped down and lo, people who look human were there! That’s about where I stopped.

Time To Go House

Smalleata and Raffles got engaged more or less, and they waited for the snow to fall to lock the weasels out of the house. They met the mother Raccoon, and then the farmer opened the house up to get an oil re-supply. That meant that the weasels could get in, so the mice used wine corks to plug their holes, and the rats (sadly) were killed by the weasels!

Then there was a huge snowstorm and it closed the gaps the weasels could get into, so the mice are all safe. They met some flying squirrels, and Smalleata and Raffles’ big engagement-wedding party dealie started happening. All of the mice are in the television room, and Mr. Gogie, the dwarf-gnome thing, is about to arrive to tell them what the human President is saying in the “State of the Human Union Address”.

Those are the pages I _should_ have read tonight. Instead, I stayed at work to set up a cool event for tomorrow. I didn’t get home until about midnight, and I started reading then while I ate some cheese and crackers. I got 30 pages of God Particle done. It was about the history of particle accelerators. I learned some cool stuff about cyclotrons and synchrotrons and Big Science.

I will have to find time to read 60 pages of ringworld and time to go house tomorrow, because there simply is not enough focus in my possession at this point at night to practice speed reading effectively.

This is a major lesson that’s been getting bigger and bigger this week: don’t leave reading for “after the rest of my life” at night. I have to do my best to read — yes, to speed read — throughout the day, or this won’t work!

Goodnight 🙂