Saturday, May 04, 2013

Reading


A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.
I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
--Henry David Thoreau



Did you ever feel that there are so many books that you want to read-- all at once? It's probably akin to people who want to sample everything on the buffet table.

When Alka Seltzer celebrated their seventy-fifth anniversary they did so with style. They hosted a buffet at the Las Vegas Hilton composed of 510 items.

According to Oversized Meals website, the buffet consisted of 100 varied salads, 40 different soups, 12 types of meat, including fried alligator, 10 assorted seafood dishes, and 150 desserts. The food platters required 140 feet of table space.

The buffet set a Guinness World Record.

How many books could one person read at the same time? What about speed readers?

Guinness listed Howard Berg as a world record holder when it came to fastest reader. The average person peruses a book at a leisurely pace of between 200 and 400 words a minute while Howard's average tops out at 25,000 words per minute. I don't think I could turn the pages that quickly.

Then again there's something delightful about reading at a slower pace--getting caught up in another scenario, living with a new set of characters-- with no release from the plot until the last page. And then replaying the scenes in your head, dreaming of characters at night, and wondering about the ending-- and wishing to find out what happens after the last page.




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