Why I'm such a slow reader

It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.

The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.

The second reason why I don't manage to get through the pila much faster is that, as my wife puts it, I don't read books: I study them. Meaning: I read very slowly, coming back so often to the previous sentence or the previous paragraph, and paying attention to every single word.

This is not on purpose. It has to be a consequence of my mild OCD (not serious, self-diagnosed).

I find so many typos when I read, and so many grammatical and punctuation errors, that it's annoying. Annoying to me most of the time (because the medium distracts me from the content) and occasionally even to those around me (when I can't help it and I burst and complain about it).

For example: last year I read “Nada”, a celebrated old Spanish novel. The book was first published in 1945, and the copy I had at home, being quite old, was already the eighth edition. How is it possible that after several years and so many reprints of a very well-known book, which received a very important prize, there are still trivial typos in the text? (Or: how is it possible that I seem to be the only one noticing?)

With that book at least there was the excuse of technology (or lack thereof): they didn't have word processors, automatic spell-checkers, or automatic grammar analysis back in the 40's. But, today? I think there's no excuse for any obvious typos in any commercial product published after the turn of the millennium. I mean, how costly can it be, in comparison to the grand enterprise of writing a book and getting it published, to spend a day or two feeding the damn final copy to a couple spell-checkers and a couple grammar-checkers (which are free), and reviewing all the errors they report?

And yet I keep on stumbling upon wrong punctuation marks, words swapping locations, false friends in translations, missing diacritics (lots of that in Spanish texts), strings of dots of arbitrary length instead of ellipses, spurious characters, quotation marks used for emphasis, wrong conjugations of verbs, and so on.

(Every time I complain about this I feel a bit self-concious. Of course my writing contains mistakes, too. But my astonishment is provoked by “proper books”, published books. And also by billboards, press releases, newspapers, magazines, edicts, laws, etc. In other words: text that is composed for an important purpose [sharing data with the public, educating or entertaining customers, describing rules and punishments] by teams of professionals [authors, lawyers, journalists, politicians] who are actually paid to do it well. This that you are reading right now is a personal blog, maintained in my spare time, read by three people — and a source of negative revenue to me.)

Anyway, back to my main point: I usually read too carefully. I wish I could skim, and speed-read, and not get back in the text. But I don't seem capable of that. If I were, I would read twice as many books.

Let me share a few examples to close this post.

Last year I wrote (in Spanish) about “Y: The Last Man”, and about how much I was liking it. The other day I borrowed from the local library the next two volumes (#5 and #6, out of ten), and last Thursday I finished reading no. 5.

Here go a few things I noticed while I was reading that volume (there are no spoilers).

I have to wonder how many other readers notice the error in the panel above. Either the artist (Pia Guerra) or, most likely, the inker (José Marzán) didn't notice it.

It reminded me of a web cartoon I once saw, with two kids talking about how their teacher had drawn a night sky with a half moon in it. DuckDuckGo, Google, Copilot and Claude all failed to help me find it again on the web, but in the process of searching I discovered this xkcd, which is very pertinent, too:

This secondary character, a flight attendant, was married before the plague. That has not been relevant to the story (yet), but I did notice when I saw this panel.

A classic: tripu complaining about bad translations. I know. I should say that this is a somewhat reasonable error in Spanish, and that I always have to stop and think for a moment before I use either “infligir” (“inflict”) or “infringir” (“infringe”).

Still. A translator is a professional who is supposed to know both languages well, and is paid to produce good copy.

Would you have interrupted your flow of reading to stop and notice these silly things? I wish I didn't — and I would have already read both volumes, instead of just the first one!