Saturday, May 23: Mississippi Mud
WHAT’S THE BIG HURRY?
by John M. Floyd
I once saw a skit that poked fun at the talent-competition part of televised beauty pageants. It featured a young lady who marched onstage and announced that her talent was “speed reading.” She spent the next minute or so staring with fierce concentration at the book in her hand and flipping pages as fast as she could. When the book was finished she closed it, smiled, took a bow, and left the stage.
Some of my friends seem to take about the same amount of time she did to get through a novel. They say they often read several books a week, sometimes twenty or more in a month. I can’t help wondering how they can accomplish that. Do they do nothing but read? Do they just comprehend things faster than I do? Are they lying?
Or do they skip part of the book when they read one?
I bet that’s the case. I’m not saying they skip things all the time, but with certain novels I suspect they read some parts and skim over others. I don’t much like that.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve done my share of skimming and skipping. But it usually involved technical manuals and newspapers and annual reports. Fiction I don’t skip. I read every single word in a story or novel. If I find myself ignoring paragraphs or sentences or even words, something’s wrong. I’ll eventually give up on the book.
Some time ago, I was reading Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, and at one point Clancy took several pages to describe in painful detail the arming of a nuclear device. I finally surrendered and skipped that part. For some reason I went on to finish the book (probably because I’d been so impressed with The Hunt for Red October, years earlier) — but I’m usually not that forgiving. I mean, Jeez Louise, there are too many other good books out there waiting for me to read them. I don’t need to be skipping over parts of the narrative.
My determination to read every word of the story is one reason I so despise those Reader’s Digest condensations. A used-bookstore owner here in Jackson once told me her customers often buy them because they have nice colorful spines that look good on their home shelves. Well, there ain’t none of ’em on my shelves. I don’t want someone condensing a novel for me so it’ll be a quicker read — that seems even worse than my leaving out parts of it on my own.
Am I in the minority, here? Do any of the rest of you find it necessary to read and register every word of a story? Do you regularly skip some of it instead? Does it bother you if/when you do that? Maybe I’m being too picky.
All this reminds me of Elmore Leonard’s tenth rule of writing: “Leaving out the parts people skip” would indeed solve the problem. And I think he really does that. I think most good writers do.
Meantime, I’d better sign off. I have a back issue of AHMM waiting for me, and I need to get started on it.
Reading every bit of every story takes me a while . . .
I find myself skipping paragraphs of description from time to time. If I skip too many I stop reading and go on to some other book.
By the way, I just read and enjoyed your “The Powder Room” in AHMM (I think?). YOu might be interested to know Jack Ritchie anticipated your safe trick in a story called “Shatter Proof,” which appears in his book LITTLE BOXES OF BEWILDERMENT.
Thanks, Rob. I’ve not yet seen my story, but I understand it’s in the AHMM July/August issue. I did read the excerpt on their web site.
And I’m pleased just to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Jack Ritchie. I’ve got to get hold of those Ritchie collections–I love his stories.
If it’s something by a writer I really like I never skip a word. If it isn’t, I skim and skip a lot. At times I give up on a short story after a few paragraphs and go on to the next. People give me books to read and they normally get short shrift. The other day someone gave me two books, each more than 800 pages. I “read” them both in five minutes.
Skipping for me means the novel isn’t worth the effort, so I don’t feel bad when I skip and then throw the book in the forget it pile.
When I was a kid, I could speed-read. I didn’t call it that, I just read fast. I could knock off a novel in a couple of hours, not War and Peace, of course, but an average James Bond.
Somewhere in my late teens I lost that superpower. Probably my kryptonite was girls or cars… girls, for sure.
Leigh, I think I used to read faster, too, than I do now. And I probably misstated in saying I ALWAYS read every word — I agree with Louis and Dick in that I often skip over things in books that I find I don’t like. But those are the ones I give up on. I’m WAY more inclined now than I used to be to quit reading a book halfway through. Again, there are too many wonderful novels — and stories — out there to waste time on one that doesn’t measure up.
And Leigh, I imagine your kryptonite is still girls and cars, right? Girls, for sure . . .