|
-
Hivemind social net
-
News
- Features
- Blogs
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Google Toolbar scifi
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
How to cheat-read
01/01/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark has a confession to make. He has recently started doing what he calls cheat-reading of certain books. He really likes cheat-reading books. Particularly because he has a house with 20,000 books and by cheat-reading he can get to a lot more of them. A few months back I wrote an editorial about the way I had stumbled onto for graphing the plot and interactions of a story. I came upon this method sitting waiting for a lesser-known Shakespeare play - one of the histories - whose plot I had not seen before. There was a program book had a summary of the plot, knowing that it would be unfamiliar to many in the audience. I had a while before the play was to start and on the spot I invented a way to commit to paper the plot I was reading. It worked amazingly well.
Recently necessity was again the mother of invention for me. I invented or discovered or re-discovered a way to "cheat-read" a book and make it a better and faster read than sitting down and reading it at normal speed. I call it "cheat-reading." It actually makes it more fun to read a book.
Here is how I came up with it. A friend had recommended to me the book The Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. It sounded good so I got from the library an unabridged reading of this book on CD. With a portable CD player I listened to the entire book while working around the house. I liked the book and recommended it to a book discussion group I attend, and they chose the book to read. Now I wanted to refresh my memory as to what was in the book. But I did not want to take the time to read the entire book that I had already read (or heard read). I hit upon a way to just refresh my memory about what was in the book without actually taking the time to read it in the traditional sense.
This is what I did. I committed to reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. If I found the sentence interesting I would skim the rest of the paragraph. If it were really interesting I would read the entire paragraph. I also could just go on to the second sentence and then make that choice again how to read the rest. That's it. It was just a formal way of skimming the book, I suppose, but I made sure I got to every paragraph. Basically, I commit to reading the first sentence of each paragraph and then however much more and at however much depth seems appropriate.
Now this technique is "cheating" I suppose. Obviously you miss some of the material of the book reading it that way. I might not do this if I was expected to know everything in the book. I do not suggest that you should try this reading technique on How To Operate Your Nuclear Reactor. But I might do it in my pleasure reading. Even with an exciting book like Shadow Divers there were long stretches of detail that were only vaguely of interest. The book got most of its dramatic impact from some sections and very little from others. By cheat-reading the less interesting portions went by very quickly since I was reading only one sentence per paragraph.
The more interesting sections became a much larger proportion of my reading time. When I got to the end of the book I found I had gotten as much enjoyment reading it this way as I had listening to the book. I remembered no details from the longer reading that I did not pick up from the cheat-reading of the book. If anything I think the book actually got better by reading it this accelerated fashion. I remember that when I started I felt that I was cheating, but by the end of the book I had totally forgotten who it was who was being cheated. If a reader you can get the point that the author is making, that is the important part, not necessarily the completeness of reading every word of the book.
I enjoyed by cheat-reading of Shadow Divers. About this time I also borrowed form the library the book Strange Angel by George Pendle. It is a true biography of John Whiteside Parsons a man who was a rocket scientist (literally) and also was into black magic and science fiction and knew some of the major figures of 20th Century science fiction. As I frequently do, I procrastinated getting to the book until there was not enough time to read it before the book was due back at the library. Still, the book interested me, so I asked myself why not try the new technique it.
Okay, by cheat-reading it I missed some of the technical detail of rocket engineering. I probably would not have remembered those details anyway. I think all of the interesting (and salacious) details came through loud and clear. The book took less time to read than an honest reading would have taken. If I missed something important I would not know since I have not read the whole book. But as an entertainment experience reading the book was probably just as good as if I had given it a close read.
Good writing actually lends itself to cheat-reading. Most writers are taught that they should write paragraphs that have topic sentences. The topic sentence summarizes the paragraph and is most often the first sentence of the paragraph. Good topic sentences almost beg to be cheat-read. If you read those summaries they tell you if you are interested in this paragraph or not. Now not all authors are careful to write topic sentences. I admit that my writing is more conversational and I tend to forget them.
A good writer will remember to use them. Even if the writer is not so careful, you still get a good sample of the paragraph by reading the first sentence and deciding if you want to continue on through the paragraph. My method works for me at least as well as a Reader's Digest condensation of a book. (Does Reader's Digest still condense books?) I have frequently seen books and wished I could find a good article that covered the same material in more concise form. Cheat-reading works for me as well as if I had.
Cheat-reading seems to work for me on non-fiction books, and there are a lot of non-fiction books that I am tempted to read. I wish I could devote the time to read more of these books. Now I have a better shot. I have not yet tried cheat-reading a fiction book. But I wanted to pass this idea on to people. Maybe other people will want to try it. Maybe other people have or will have their own version.
Mark R. Leeper
© 2007 Mark R. Leeper
|
|
