Speed Reading

Does anyone remember that? It was a fashion in the 1970s. (And you thought you already knew them all!) There had been perceived, by educators or maybe just by people who deliver guest lectures at business schools, two problems with books: they were long and they didn't always have pictures. In high school we had the option of taking a mini-course in speed reading. Which I did, though I don't recall the technique.

But I am thinking of it now because, speaking of the 1970s and also fashions, I have been grunting through John Updike’s novel The Coup. It occurred to me that this book ought to be ideal for speed reading. Not much happens in it; the characters hardly develop; the point of the story seems simply to exist, not to convey information, and certainly not to entertain. No buildup is apparent; no climax is promised. That the story was told at all may be paramount. If I just sweep through the pages, can I confirm this? It is almost certainly what the author wanted most for his readers to get.

I’d never read a word of Updike before and probably never will again, having heard his other novels are set in Connecticut. I decided however to investigate this one because Steve Sailer has often alluded to it. He has flip-flopped between describing the narrator as a composite Amin/Gaddafi and as Siad Barre. Whatever the resemblance, Big Steve’s own point is that Americans began to lose interest in Africa around the time Updike published this book, and the novelist was very artfully confirming that such dismissal was merited. Africa really was ridiculous.

And may still be, if Siad Barre’s protege’s granddaughter Ilhan Omar is any indication.

I suppose I could gauge the significance of The Coup, not as Africana but as literature, by reading other books published circa 1978. But...nah. I will confess here that I did not finish it, speedily or otherwise. Around page 107, I decided just to check the ends of chapters, the first having culminated in a bizarre and (for one U.S. aid-giver) fatal bonfire. This seemed as good a way as any to take the book’s measure, since there’s no table of contents and the chapters aren’t named, only numbered. I’d have to do a lot of leafing – which is sort of like reading - to find the narrative cusps, such as they are. As it happens, these did not look very interesting or pivotal, although I gather the head of the deposed king, publicly lopped off by the narrator but then stolen by men disguised as Tuaregs but smelling like Russians, reappears in animatronic form, delivering a tirade against the country’s new government. Also (if that’s the appropriate conjunction), the titular coup isn’t effected by the narrator, it’s inflicted on him.

Could’ve been. Sure. Why not. I wonder if I should go back to ODTAA and see if the same nonlinear uptake works about as well.

As I say, the book’s achievement may have been simply that it ever got into print. It then sank from intellectual view. But its fortunes may yet swing around, and it may be especially readable now. I think if you were a neutral student of the continent, you just might find this or that weird feature of the fictitious sub-Saharan country Kush corresponds even today to this or that ex-French colony. I doubt they correspond to any ex-Portuguese one.

Anyway...how is one supposed to speed read? I see now that the activity is still preached. I further see that what I was taught in high school is now called meta-guiding. Pretty much tracing a lazy S down the page. I don’t remember anything about chunking, or any mention of two things I will always and everywhere do when I read, namely, subvocalization and regression. Man, I can’t even look at a stop sign without sounding the word in my head or glancing in the rearview mirror.