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 🙂

Last night I warned that it would be short, and then it wasn’t. This time, it shall!

I went out looking for the Transit of Venus tonight, and I believe I saw its form in the shadow of sunbeams cast up from clouds the sun wandered behind, but I have no sure knowledge of it. It’s possible that my eyes just did funny things because I’d been squintily looking through my sweater at the sun. I found a neat viewing spot, and enjoyed a brisk walk around my neighbourhood and some last minute sunshine in the day.

Today was the last of our programming classes; we have a pizza party next week, but there’s no further educational content to be shared. I don’t feel like the kids are leaving empty-handed, but when I consider what we might have accomplished, I consider this to be a failure. I’ll write more about that in the future, after the team holds a retrospective on our efforts.

Today is also day two of real speed-reading. I saw a significant improvement in my times for The God Particle and Ringworld, and a slight worsening of my time on Time To Go House. I hypothesize that speed reading, especially when unpracticed, is hard, and even moreso when very tired. I did God Particle -> Ringworld -> Go House this time, proceeding from hardest (and most words / page) to easiest (and fewest), with 15 pages of God Particle done earlier in the day — between 11:15 and 12:20 I got the remaining 75 done.

The God Particle

This passage was a little bit of wrapup of the development of quantum theory (specifically the Bohr/Einstein discussions), and then a long diatribe about quack-physics, “revolutionary iconoclasts”, and the ease with which people misinterpret quantum mechanics and the scientific process. I can’t say that I disagreed with any of it, and it was good to see a well laid out discussion of how science works and the fact that a “revolution” in physics does not mean slates are wiped clean, but may mean new language to phrase problems and solutions in, while preserving and agreeing with old results.

But it felt like a long, flame-y comment in a thread on a physics forum where someone had made the mistake of mentioning that they liked What the Bleep Do We Know. I question whether it needed to be in the middle of a book like this in the chapter about particle accelerators, because anyone who has gotten here probably isn’t the problem anyway, but I suppose it had to go somewhere.

Ringworld

Louis, Speaker, Nessus, and Teela wandered around the puppeteers’ migrating homeworld a bit and then took off in a general products #3 hull fitted into a tri-wing. We got a small history lesson about the man-kzinti wars and the general products hulls, and about man’s encounters with other species so far. The crew also embarked on their way to ringworld and is nearing it rapidly, looking for signs of communicative life.

Time To Go House

Smalleata met Raffles, a house-mouse, after they settled into their winter quarters. She explored the house with him a bit, giving us a good introduction to the environment, and they jumped down the stairs together. I remember that capturing my imagination when I was little! I put myself right into their mindset, thinking. “Wow, if I were a mouse I would have SO MUCH fun jumping down stairs!” Toilet-paper as bedding was introduced, and Smalleata made a grand personal goal of one day sleeping on a bed of it.

We were also given some very strong foreshadowing of an important event, and what appears to be a description of a gnome that enters the house to watch a television program each winter. I don’t quite remember that bit. Anyway, Smalleata just went into the kitchen with Raffles. I suspect that there may be danger there.