In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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How quickly do you read?  Ever timed yourself?

I don’t know how fast, but I’m not among the world’s fastest readers or anything. I don’t even know if I read particularly fast for someone who reads all the time. I think there’s a certain danger in reading very quickly if you’re an editor. Obviously when you’re actually editing a ms. you have to slow down, but when you’re doing that initial read, I think it’s also important to not blow through the story, because you need to stop and appreciate the language and absorb all the nuance etc., that I suspect most people will miss if they’re reading at speed-reading speeds.

Years ago, I was working at a Barnes & Noble, and one of the managers there was one of those people who can read a whole 400 page novel in like an hour. I was SO JEALOUS of that guy. I would love to be able to do that as a reader…though, as I said above, I’m not sure if that would actually be good for me as an editor.

I tried a couple times to improve my reading speed just because there’s so much that I’d like to read but will never have time for, but none of that seems to have helped. If anything, I think I’ve slowed down as a reader. When I was younger and first really devoting myself to reading, for a while there, I was reading a book a day at least, and a couple of days I read more than one book (my crowning achievement was three in one day). Of course, that mostly just meant I had no life and I more or less spent all day reading the book in question. Still, it feels like I must have read more quickly back then.

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