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Never, that is, until last month. That's when Stephen Howard Berg stepped into my life, hustling his amazing Mega-Speed Reading program. According to his promises, I was just four hours (and 80 bucks) away from a new, speedier me. Four short hours, and I'd be blazing through entire books in minutes, or my money back — no questions asked. Well hell. Why not, I asked myself. I can afford to give up four hours of my life. Besides, if I pitched it right and promised a review, I could probably get Tripod to foot the bill. Done. I ordered the program. That was, perhaps, the best decision I ever made. Not because it worked; it didn't, and I won't even bother with any attempt at suspense. I sat in my kitchen through five-and-a-half hours of tapes (yeah, even that four-hour thing's a crock), and I'm still reading as slowly as ever. Here's a basic outline of the program: 1. Read really fast. 2. Read really really fast. 3. Use your finger to follow along as you read really really fast. If it sounds useless, that's because it is. The idea of the program is that we don't need to look at every little word to understand the text; just like when you're driving, you don't need to see every last car to know what's going on. So we're supposed to follow our fingertip as it snakes down the page like a skier down a mountain. We're supposed to absorb entire paragraphs with one backward sweep of the eyes. We're supposed to just "see" the page, and we're supposed to see it really, really fast. Maybe he can do it, but I sure as hell can't. If I want to know what the words say, I've got to look at them. Maybe it's a me thing. But maybe not: Here, let's run another experiment. Read this sentence: "Stephen Howard Berg must be on crack if he thinks I have the potential to read and understand an entire novel in under 15 minutes." Now read it again, only this time, I've taken out the extraneous words so that you can read it more quickly. This should give you an idea what it's like to read using the Mega-Speed Reading technique: "Stephen crack novel." Doesn't have quite the same flavor, does it? There's more, of course. Berg fills his five-plus hours with all sorts of handy tips for reading quickly, like "Read a book you're familiar with." Brilliant. I'll bet I could really fly through a book I've got memorized, but frankly that's not much help. Or "Just read the first and last paragraph of a chapter." Duh. How do you think I got through college in the first place? I know what you're thinking. If Mega-Speed reading is such a waste, then why do I say it was such a monumentally great buy? Because it cured my self-esteem problem. It demonstrated, once and for all, that stupidity is not the sole domain of the slow reader. Why, Stephen Howard Berg reads thousands of words a minute (I saw him do it, right there on my TV!), and he's a complete idiot. One last tidbit: My favorite moment in the entire program comes when Berg explains the backward-reading technique. He concedes that the concept is a bit unorthodox, but insists that we're just looking at it all wrong. "People think you can't read backward," he says. "But think about it: In Hebrew they read backward, and no one says the book is broken!" I'll say it one last time: I'm Dan, and I read slow. But I am not a dumb guy. Hey, I was smart enough to make Tripod buy these tapes, wasn't I? What personal insecurity have you conquered, and how did you do it? Was the solution "out there," or was it just in the way you were looking at things? Come check in at the Society/Culture conference and share your story. Dan Reines is a raving lunatic. Please, for the love of God, pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard. |
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