Rabbit hole of reading speeds

I've been doing some research about reading speeds. Even though the subject is not a new interest for me - as I already wrote a post on speed listening to audiobooks - this time the curiosity came from a a different source. 

I finished My Friends by Fredrik Backman this past Sunday (at 4am, thanks to my newly adopted puppy). I started reading this book 15 days before, during my endless flight back from Brazil. The interesting thing about this one is that within the first hour of reading I already knew the book was one of my favorites ever; and yet, I took over two weeks to finish it. While some books I have not even liked at all, I finished in a day or two. That's how my mind started questioning: does it mean I like a book less because I am not reading as fast as I used to?

I had two guesses at this point: 
1. Reading slower makes me sit through the book through different moments of my life, so I might be struggling with one intense feeling at the start and be in a completely different mind-set at the end - this could be very good or very bad, depending on what is going on with my life. When I started My Friends I was coming back from visiting my home country, stuck at airports and planes for nearly 24h. I still had the very fresh memory of reading A Little Life just a couple of weeks before... safe to say I was in tears in the first few chapters. And laughing. And absolutely in love with the way Fredrik Backman writes (till the very end).  
2. Reading slower makes me think through the details of the story more - I pay more attention. I re-read parts if I feel I missed something. I remember taking a very long time to read Lessons in Chemistry, and that is also one of my favorite books - and it is a story that lives rent-free in my mind. I can remember far more about that book than so many I read in the last 12 months. 

I was curious, I had to look the subject up. Here is some of what I gathered: Some people like to speed-read. Some people read fast because they simply have a better vocabulary. Some people read slower because they want to stay in the story as long as they possibly can (definitely not mystery readers). There has been some deeper quantified research that show better understanding and brain functionality when reading slower. Some speed-readers honestly enjoy reading like that, and some might be benefitting from it (reading is reading after all, there are always benefits to it). Some researchers believe speed reading does not matter at all when it comes to detail-filtering and information keeping. And most of all: the attention span matters. 

There are so many ways to look at how people read. I don't know how to explain that I finished a book I honestly thought very bad in only a couple of days. Maybe because it was good enough to keep me interested? I got to a conclusion many others have already gotten to before: it is not about how fast or how slow - or how many either - reading is personal. Personality. Life priorities. It truly depends on each person to make the decision that better fits them. And that decision might be to not read at all. 

Being a person that loves reading, I have fallen into the mentality of needing to devour every single book with rush. Wanting to read more and more and more until I can read everything in front of me - safe to say I will never get there, even if I did not have a job, a house, a puppy... a life?! In the past year I had to shift my perspective and be mindful of the quality of my readings. The simple answer to my own question being: No, I did not like the book less because I took extra time to finish it. I enjoyed every second of it. 

This week's recommendations: My Friends by Fredrik Backman