I read slowly and don’t remember much of what I read.
Please tell me how I can read faster and remember as much as possible.
Is there a difference in reading speed and the amount of information retained between novels and business books?
How slow is slow? Assuming you can’t read at the same speed you speak and there are no injuries or other conditions getting in the way, you can just practice reading until you get there. For the most part there really is no need to read any faster than that, as comprehension is very high. Just take breaks to ask yourself what you just read, and make notes if it’s something you intend to learn long term.
If it’s an issue with focus, a little trick I invented when I was a kid was to change my mental voice to a character from a show. It’s much easier to pay attention to the blah blah of something I have absolutely no interest in when “Iago” (Gilbert Gottfried) is dictating it to me.
If you don’t have the best grasp of the language then I’d suggest picking reading material that has been narrated by an actual human and reading along with the narrator, one finger underlining the word you’re at. Just be sure to actually read the words as you go to the best of your ability.
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Best way I know is to think about what you read, both while reading and after. You can alway associate it to an image, maybe the book cover if it’s at all memorable.
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When a book is information dense (but not too info dense), I use a memory palace and place notable facts along a journey. This allows me to have a summary of the book after I read it to review at my own convenience. People might say, why don’t you just take notes? But when you take information and have to encode it as an object, much deeper processing has to be done than to merely reread or copy the text, which really takes basically no effort or processing to do. Also, my memorizing the text means I can recall and more deeply integrate the knowledge whenever I want, whereas often notes are lost or forgotten about, either as an underlined passage in the book, or a random text document that is never organized.
The main problem behind this strategy is finding books which are even worth memorizing. Either a book is a textbook, in which case we probably shouldn’t jump straight to encoding in a memory palace as a textbook is super info dense, or a novel, in which case a memory palace is unnecessary because the book is made to be memorable, or something inbetween, in which case it is often an unrigorous or suspicious book such as how to win friends and influence people.
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