I&#x27;m not sure what else I can write to convince you -- I&#x27;ve detailed how I &quot;read&quot; so quickly in a few comments on this topic.  It&#x27;s true but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s all that unusual (your comment is making me think it may be which I&#x27;ll try to keep from going to my head).<p>I used to work in Infrastructure in the early 2000s and a coworker and I had a running contest on how many certifications we could amass (my company had a library of reading materials).  It was my coworker who pushed me to take a speed reading course.  We&#x27;d each read 600+ page books covering the material around 3 times (maybe 4, but later reads are not complete reads) over a week while testing each other at work.  Both of our pass rates were perfect[1] (Novell CNE, CNA, MCNE, A+, Security+  -- do those still exist? -- and a myriad of other certifications of dubious worth) -- failing meant we had to pay out of pocket, so we passed.<p>The &quot;first read&quot; is a skim&#x2F;scan, very superficial read, and it&#x27;s easy to get through a large book this way, especially if it&#x27;s material I&#x27;m already comfortable with.  The 1000 page books are technical books (points I made elsewhere) that aren&#x27;t all wall to wall content, lots of diagrams, code, etc.  I read a book more than once if I want to learn the content (the first read is partly to weed out a book that has no value to me).<p>At the end of the day, it&#x27;s the equivalent time it takes to <i>learn</i> the material that matters.  After a 2 hour &quot;read&quot; (skim&#x2F;scan&#x2F;speed-read) of a 1,000 page book, I&#x27;m nowhere <i>near</i> where I&#x27;d be if I had read the entire thing, slowly, word-for-word while taking notes and doing exercises.  If I feel the book is worth it, I&#x27;ll read it again, then read parts of it carefully, to the point where I&#x27;ve likely read the book 3-4 times with notes and exercises included.  I&#x27;m at &quot;equivalent to reading it slowly&quot; by the end of the second read.  But that&#x27;s a <i>low</i> bar for a book of that size.  Considering that same exercise would have taken me a month to complete the <i>first</i> read.  How much of Chapter 4-6 will I remember on day 30 of multi-evening broken-up reading sessions reading it &quot;slowly&quot;?  How likely am I to be burned out by then?  By doing it this way, much more of it is fresh in my mind and (most important to me), I&#x27;m more likely to devote the time to learning the material knowing it will take a week, not a month+, to get what I want out of the book.  After finishing a C++ book recently, I was writing in the language.  I&#x27;m nowhere <i>near</i> proficient, having only two books and a 10-year gap in my C++ code experience, but &quot;the old way&quot; I would have been more likely to let it sit on the shelf half-read, never completing it.  If I did, I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to write more than a &quot;Hello, World&quot; program without having it pulled up along-side my IDE, constantly referring to bits I hadn&#x27;t read in over a week.<p>[1] Pass rates, not scores. There were some tests I squeaked by one question over passing. I scored perfectly on more than a few, though, too.