The Age of Accelerated Reading

The literary world is enamored with speed. Not the speed of thought, reflection, and insight, but the speed of consumption— the desideratum of vigorously chomping through two hundred books a year, and the shame that reels back after failing to finish your goal, or which may result in an even worse outcome, succeeding with flying colors. Reviewers, especially influencers on BookTok, have turned reading into a sort of performance: a tally of the pages devoured per day, authors conquered, five-star ratings awarded. The natural conclusion from this obsession with constant consumption is no longer what you took away from the book, or how it challenged your worldview, but how quickly you were able to move through it.

Consider the mechanics of this acceleration. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram consistently award the flashy, rapid, and digestible to exploit the split-second attention spans of doomscrollers deciding with a flick of their finger whether or not to stay. If on your screen is a woman with two towers of books behind her, promising to tell you whether to read them with a yes, no, or maybe, then you might be more likely to linger. I am a victim of these videos—they often result in me adding a few more books to my To Be Read list, which is already gargantuan enough as it is. The only problem is what this signals to readers: you must get through at least X amount of books to be considered a reader. The subtlety of the sentence structure, the labor of a metaphor, the architecture of the narrative – it is all flattened under the weight of velocity. And yet, readers willingly participate in this trend, drawn in by the promise of belonging: the chance to know every trending title, to share their own thoughts on the book before anyone else does, to appear well-read.

But speed is not comprehension. There is a distinction between the act of reading and the act of remembering, a distinction that is often blurred in the act of rushing. Psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, in his methodical study of memory in the nineteenth century, introduced to us the Forgetting Curve. We forget most of what we absorb within days. To read without pause, without reflection, is to invite this forgetfulness.

It is tempting to frame accelerated reading as an aspiration. Finishing dozens of books a month and hundreds a year signals diligence and intelligence. This can be seen in action in the comments of TikTok videos eulogizing anyone who read an perceptibly insane amount of books:

Reyna Booktok stated “THREE HUNDREDDDDDS. that’s so legit!!!!! Wow. Goals!!!!!” [comment from TikTok.] Credit: @reynasbookshelf / Reyna Booktok

Somehow, the simple act of doing more confers an air of credibility and authenticity. Yet in practice, reading this amount of books resembles a ledger rather than any meaningful back-and-forth dialogue. The reward is numerical, the feedback immediate, and the stakes illusory. One can read twenty books in a week and not know any of them, yet still appear knowledgeable simply by the act. Conversely, a single slow, meticulous read, marked with marginalia, revisitations, and conversations, does not carry a weight that a TikTok video can exploit.

What this shift exposes is a fundamental tension in the contemporary reader. In a world where speed is held as a zenith characteristic, reading something so slow as to understand it is now held in an implied but undeniably real contempt. There is a difference between reading as consumption and reading as understanding. Today, consumption privileges spectacle, breadth and speed. Understanding privileges depth, patience, and retention. The former is performative; the latter is formative. And yet the two are often conflated, leaving readers and writers alike to negotiate a system that rewards display over any substance.

That is not an argument against reading widely or reading quickly. Stephen King writes in his book On Writing that in order to be a half-decent writer, you must be an exceptional reader. Rather, this argument is a caution: the more we chase the next book, the more we risk losing the meaning of the stories themselves. To read, in the sense that literature demands, is to inhabit a book fully, whether to interrogate its sentences, to measure its claims, to see how the scaffolding of narrative and argument holds – or collapses – under scrutiny. Anything less is kind of a passing amusement, something ephemeral that vanishes almost immediately after the page turns.

The challenge, then, is simple yet radical: to read at a pace that permits reflection, to resist the demand for constant consumption and updates to your Goodreads, and to reclaim the work of remembering as part of the work of reading itself. In a culture obsessed with speed, the slow reader becomes subversive: patient, deliberate, attentive. Perhaps, in the end, that is the most radical act of all.