Not doing it for political reasons at all
Within weeks – i.e. before the election. Definitely before the election.
Donald Trump has been on Fox & Friends this morning. Among the tidbits are that he said he had read Bob Woodward’s book Rage last night, and that it was “boring”. The book runs to some 400 pages.
Trump can barely read at all. People who can barely read read very slowly. They read one word at a time instead of a sentence or phrase at a time; it’s slow work. Being barely able to read rules out being able to skim effectively.
(By the way whatever happened to “speed reading”? Remember that? Claims of being able to read an entire page at a glance and thus read an average-length book in an hour? It never made any sense to me and still doesn’t.)
The president has promised there will be a coronavirus vaccine within “weeks”. “I’m not doing it for political reasons. I want the vaccine fast” he said.
News flash, pumpkin head: we all want the vaccine fast. You want it before the election.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, has said he is cautiously optimistic a vaccine will be approved by the end of the year or early next year. But Fauci has also emphasized the vaccine will likely not be widely distributed until well into 2021.
End of the year is too late. Has to be before the election. There will be announcements that a vaccine has been perfected before the election. Caputo and Alexander will issue them even if no one else will.
He’ll probably issue an executive order approving the Russian vaccine.
I do remember speed reading! I took a class in it as a kid/tween but don’t think much of it sank in–I remember thinking at the time that using these techniques took the pleasure out of reading and enjoying a story or an explanation. Interesting that that was a thing back in the day and isn’t a thing any more. Maybe the current equivalent is thos precis services you can subscribe to that provide one-page reviews of popular or noteworthy books. Or maybe we just spend so much time reading blog posts and tweets that the actual idea of reading a whole book, however quickly, just isn’t that salient a skill any more (though I do understand that reports of the death of the book form have been greatly exaggerated).
I read a lot more slowly now than when I was in my teens and 20s, possibly because I haven’t really felt like I had to get through a lot of reading in a short time since undergrad (I now have less mandatory reading and a lot more time). I read as if reading aloud in my head (which is an extremely useful way to read if you’re editing), and due to being online so much my attention span is now pretty short so I’m lucky if I get through a chapter before checking something online or getting up to do something else. Hard to say ‘how many books I read in a month’ or whatever reading metric we want to use since I’m usually reading half a dozen books at a time (on different media (computer screen or paper), or in different rooms, or different sizes and formats–I’ve got a heavy hardback on the couch, but if I want to grab a book to take out with me it’ll be a lighter paperback). Interested in what others have to say.
That was my experience, too. I didn’t gain anything from the class but an appreciation of how wonderful it can be to read a book when you are not speed reading.
The equivalent in my field is the educators who read an abstract of a study and immediately implement the procedures described from the glowing reports of incredible success. We are told by our bosses to just read these short things that don’t take more than a few minutes. In short, we can read them because there is time. So I took time to read some of the research. It was…grim. You would never know from the abstract what it really said. I think I’ll stick with real reading.
And as for Trump? Someone probably drew him a picture book copy of Woodward’s book, and put it in one syllable words. “Bad” “Good” “President” “Virus” “TV”
Trump will announce that a vaccine for COVID-19 has been perfected, but it’s being held captive in a subterranean lair by the Rothschilds, along with one million abused children, and is being protected by Antifa forest fires.
“Bad” “Good” “President” “Virus” “TV”
Snicker
These five word lists will always have to end with ‘TV’.
I’ve found a kind of speed-reading that works well for newspaper copy. I read into each paragraph until I pretty much know what it’s going to say, and then skip to the next. Newspaper prose has a somewhat standard style, and after a while it feels like a rock skipping across a pond, just touching each paragraph enough to skip to the next: SKIP SKIP Skip Skip skip skip kip kip p p p p p…and then I’m through the article and on to the next.
I vaguely recall that some studies revealed that “speed readers” essentially only retained the bare bones of what they read. As in, if it was a mystery novel they might be able to tell you “some rich dude was found dead during a holiday weekend he was hosting at an English country house. The detective discovered that the butler did it,” but not any details beyond that. It’s basically what the rest of us call “skimming.”
Trump has almost every characteristic of the stereotypical shitty boss. He thinks that leadership is just saying “I WANT THIS DONE NOW!” so that everyone is properly motivated. He thinks that anyone who tries to explain why this can’t be done within the time frame requested is a Negative Nelly or a loser or incompetent or bad for morale, while the ass-kisser who assures him that it’ll all be taken care of is a real positive go-getter. Even when it becomes apparent that it can’t, in fact, be done in that time frame (or is done so badly that it’s a disaster), the fault does not lie in the leader who set unrealistic demands or the people who assured him they were realistic, it lies with the subordinates who were presumably too lazy or sloppy or dumb to GIT ‘ER DONE.
Donnie read a 400 page book in one night? Is this satire? No wonder his comprehension of things is so lacking. Maybe there’s a synopsis on the inside jacket, that’s probably what he meant.
I remember Evelyn Wood’s speed reading course when I was in school, but I never took it, I had to settle for Cliffs Notes, which saved me some torturous hours of assigned reading. How I hated assigned reading…
Surely the issue isn’t whether it’s assigned or not but whether it’s any good or not, of any interest or not, usefully informative or not.
For sure, I did have some good assigned reading, but I always had other things I would have preferred to read. The libe was always more interesting than class. ;)
Yes, I did too, but then I was young and my tastes were undeveloped, plus I was very ignorant. I needed that assigned reading.
Well being the young antiauthoritarian autodidact that I was, to be quite honest, it didn’t often serve me well. ;) Luckily I had a couple of great teachers who overlooked these flaws and pointed me in the right direction.
twiliter, I was a bit of an antiauthoritarian autodidact, too, but I did welcome the assistance. Plus, if they assigned something, my mother had to let me read it. Her idea of suitable reading for girls did not extend much past Heidi. So I welcomed the assigned reading. Didn’t get smacked upside the head for reading it if my teacher said I had to.
Once I learned to hide books under my bed, and to hide behind my bed while reading, well, then things were different.
Well I was an antiauthoritarian autodidact too but that was the problem – I didn’t know enough to didact auto yet. I wasted much of a good pre-university education as a result (and finally saw the point of the whole thing when I did go to university). I wish I had been less antiauthoritarian (plus lazy) and more interested in what I was being taught.
I did at least learn French well enough to read it easily, because we started early.
I had a unit on speed reading in 6th grade, but I don’t think it was the standard course. Some sort of machine at the front of the class would feed sentences to us in incremental bits, gradually going faster over time. We charted our speeds in a notebook. At the end of the program (2 weeks? don’t remember) we were all reading lines at a speed which had been incomprehensible when we started. A review of our beginning speed made us laugh … sooo slooow. It had seemed reasonable once.
Did it stick? Maybe. I’m a fast reader.
Trump not only couldn’t read the book, he’d have trouble seeing anything but the word “Trump.” His handlers may have had to do a picture board with cartoon illustrations of a few main points. Basically, reminding him of what he said.
Sorry to hear that, my situation was one bordering on neglectful, so I was able to read anything that I could find. The most trouble I got in was for being under foot while reading something in an old set of Encyclopedia Brittanica we had in the entryway, which happened pretty often when I was very young, or not coming in to dinner because I was lost in some book or magazine or other. The idea of what was suitable for me to read probably didn’t occur to my folks, or if it did I wasn’t aware of it.
I was allowed to read whatever I wanted (although there was a point when my mother suggested I should read some nonfiction along with fairy tales and the like, when I was around 10, but it wasn’t an order, just advice), but the problem was I was a slacker in school, and that was a waste.
I had a keen sense of being ‘institutionalized’ in grade school, it was like prison to me, and I objected in some not so subtle ways, so I didn’t do well until I got into college and could choose my own path. I went from getting D’s, (mostly due to truancy) in high school, to a 4.0 in college, simply because of my attitude towards it. I did probably miss out on some things, but with the encouragement of a couple of great teachers I made it through. Then in my mid-30’s it was like I rediscovered reading and buried myself in non fiction for a decade. So yes, I don’t waste time reading things that aren’t highly interesting to me, or at least highly entertaining. I am a slow reader for the simple reason that I tend to enjoy it, and if it’s thought provoking, I read even slower. If I find some work of fiction that is fast paced, I think I can manage 100 pages an hour, but I don’t enjoy reading fast. I try not to think about how undereducated I still am at my age.
I did too. I really hated school. I too turned around completely once I got out, but that doesn’t stop me wishing I hadn’t wasted the education.
Back in the day if I wanted to estimate how long it would take me to finish a book I’d estimate a page a minute for ‘normal’ reading, faster if it were a thriller/’quick read’. As I mentioned, I have a lot more time now and a lot less pressure to read things, so I can’t recall having done that in a while aside from a general ‘you can finish this this afternoon’ thought.
I decided some time ago that life is too short to read bad books. I now keep a list of my “aborted” books along side my list of the books I read.
As for my mother determining what was fit for me to read, it probably had a lot to do with being fundamentalist Christian. And antifeminist. But my teachers were assigning a lot of books she never would have let me read. She never protested against the books my teachers were assigning because that would have entailed too much energy to find out about them. At least, until in my senior year when the Great Books teacher was going to assign the Communist Manifesto; all the parents in my deep red town rose en masses to protest, so she substituted the book of Matthew. They were happy, but would have been horrified had they seen how she taught it. She encouraged us to be critical thinkers, and most of us concluded it was absolutely fantasy fiction and in most places, not even good poetry. She would have taught the Communist Manifesto the same way, but parents couldn’t abide the idea of their children being exposed (I have news for said parents: most of us had already read it).