As a kid, I hated reading books. In the summertime, the library had a reading program for kids to encourage them to read more books. They had a poster on the wall with all the kids' names and a star beside their names for each book they read. The stars were what they used before they had smiley faces. At the end of the summer, I had one star for the book I checked out at the beginning of the summer and returned at the end of the summer. I never read the book, but I got the star, anyhow. I guess the librarian thought that anyone who would keep a book that long must have read it over and over again.
In college, one of the basic courses was English Literature. We were assigned some classical novels to read. I still had not developed a taste for reading and by then there were ways to get around a lot of the reading that I would have to do. Most people know about Cliffs Notes. Apparently Cliff saw an opportunity to make some money by reading books and condensing them down to a small pamphlet of notes. You could read one of his abbreviated versions of a book and write a report or participate in a discussion with almost the same result as if you had read the book. Unfortunately, I didn't discover Cliffs Notes until my second semester of college. So I had to read the books I was assigned. That turned out to be a good thing, because for the first time in my life, I enjoyed reading books. At least I enjoyed reading classical and other well written books. It was interesting to me how some writers would put words together in ways that I had never heard them used. One particular phrase from the "Mayor of Casterbridge" that always stuck in my mind was "I heard an illegal noise." I still don't know what constitutes an "illegal noise".
As it turns out, Cliffs Notes didn't help me all that much. It seems Cliff didn't enjoy reading engineering books. Maybe one of the reasons I didn't like reading was that I was a miserably slow reader and had mountains of stuff to read. So I found that they had a speed reading course at the college and I could get credit for it. Before I knew it, I was reading 100 pages per minute. The trouble was, I could only process about 100 words per minute. By the time I got to page 100 while reading, my mind was still back on page 1 trying to figure out what I had read. I think all that grits I ate as a kid permanently slowed my mind down. My first math professor in college called me "Mr. Pedestrian Mind". I eventually got through college by spending all my awake time reading.
Over time I have developed a sort of hybrid method of reading. It combines some of the speed reading skills I learned in college and my natural plodding style of reading. If it's boring information I read the first line of the paragraph and skip to the next paragraph until I get to something that is interesting. Then I revert to my plodding style of reading and toil over every word absorbing each of them like a sponge. This is the way I read news and research data. For recreational reading, I discovered audio books several years ago. I guess I should actually call it recreational listening. For someone like me who has an innate curiosity about almost everything, you have to come to terms with reading.
Reading and algebra are two of the more useful thing I learned in school. I remember when I had my brain injury and was being released from the hospital I had plans to go home and read since I had such great difficulty walking or doing anything else. When I got home, however, I found that I did not have the memory capacity to process even a sentence. Reading was out of the question. My mother, trying to be helpful, told people that I couldn't read and for some reason I anassed a pile of large print books. I told Mom that I could see fine but that I couldn't remember what I saw. I donated all the books to the library to sell. I found an old textbook and did trigonometry that winter to amuse myself.
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