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    A Year in Reading: Farooq Ahmed

    by Farooq Ahmed Dec 16, 2020 5 minutes

    I am a slow reader. And it has taken me nearly a lifetime to embrace this—to see this potential flaw as a feature not a bug (as they say in certain northern California circles). My lack of speed must have been apparent from an early age, because when I was young my parents enrolled me in a speed-reading course, which was held in what felt like the basement of a used bookstore on a former main street in a town just west of Kansas City.

    I hated those classes.

    Speed-reading trains you to expand your field of view to process chunks of texts—phrases and lines first, then entire paragraphs and pages—not individual words. You’re meant to absorb the content as if by osmosis. The sessions in that basement felt like a literal death by 1,000 paper cuts as the pages flew by.

    I was miserable enough to eventually commit myself

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