Speed Reading the Novel: Reading Dynamics and the Value of Reading at Midcentury

Abstract This essay explores the literary foundations of the mid-twentieth-century speed-reading craze. Focusing on the most popular speed-reading program of its day, Reading Dynamics, and on its founder, Evelyn Wood, a former high school and university English instructor, I suggest understanding midcentury speed reading as part of our disciplinary history. Reading Dynamics claimed its students could learn to read “at a pace formerly reserved for electronic computers,” pitching speed reading as a solution to information overload. However, it was also concerned with defending the value of literary reading as both specialized skill and pleasurable pursuit. Despite the company’s invocations of computing, its materials emphasize reading as an embodied, subjective, and specifically human pursuit. While speed reading is remembered today as a scam, its attention to skills for reading literature aligns it with close reading, another midcentury literary reading practice. Emerging in response to the ever-deepening flood of information and to the rise of reading machines designed to process it, both close reading and speed reading sought to promote, in their different ways, the value of reading literature in a world that seemed increasingly uninterested in taking the time to do it.