Consider Reading Slowly

At the end of 2025.

Apparently I was excited enough about this coupon in 2008 (in graduate school) that I took a picture of it. That’s how much I loved reading.

I have become a slow reader.

I used to be a very, very fast one.

I won’t go into why — I explained it here a few months ago, if you want to know, although the health problems mentioned here are now over and I can read sitting up (hurray!) — but I’ll share that it’s a very good thing for me in this season of life.

This fall, I read Grace Hamman’s newest book one chapter at a time, mostly at the park while my children played. The gratitude I felt for being able to read and enjoy and savor this one chapter each day made the experience wonderfully sweet. I also had time to let each chapter sink into my own life, to ponder it at the rate of twenty pages at a time, instead of 150 or 200 or whatever other page length I might’ve read in one day in previous years.

I am reading Nadya Williams’s new book the same way, a chapter at a time, or sometimes more, just over the days, and having the same experience. My goodness, it is different to let the stories of the Ancient world and their connections with present-day Christianity step along with me at a slow pace, instead of a speedy one. The experience is new, rewarding, different.

I’m also reading LuElla D'Amico’s book on reading with children — one of her areas of expertise and one of my areas of interest. Thinking about the wondrous works for me very well at something less than lightning speed.

Then there’s Shemaiah Gonzalez’s book. Very short chapters, each one a different mix of hardship and consolation. Shemaiah walks along a muddy English trail and gets stuck, one foot in, one foot out. I could’ve breezed by this. Instead, I understood something new: I’m not the only one for whom a little experience like this becomes an internal marker, a milestone in the development and understanding of self.

With the children, I’m reading a wonderful book on pioneer life in the 1840s. There are stories and then diagrams and other little bits and bobs of information. Reading slowly, I get ideas: We can’t make maple syrup, but how about if we try to boil the syrup in our fridge down into sugar? Cue a wonderful experiment and lesson on the stages of boiling candy (soft ball, hard crack, etc.). The first time, we failed, and ended up with burnt maple candy, which was honestly not much of a failure. The second time — well, let me just say that maple sugar tastes amazing in my coffee and my oatmeal this week!

Oh, so friends, consider reading slowly. Consider reading not for volume and as a deadlined-task, even though this type of reading can also be enjoyable, but instead for the opportunity to rest and savor. When reading was taken away from me, I hardly knew how to face the time ahead. With it back in my life once more, I think: What new and joyous thing is this? I’m so lucky to now enjoy reading deeply and slowly.