Skipping & slogging

The WSJ recently ran a frisnic on reading styles—in depth vs. skimming. (Or, as Cynthis Crossen clarifies, skipping.)

When I was being paid to read books and scripts for film and TV companies in Hollywood, it was clear to me from the “coverage” (basically, book reports) of other story analysts that many of them flew through the “properties”, barely touching down every six chapters or so to pick something up.

I, on the other hand, slogged through just about every single thing. Except for the one historical romance that was so long (more than 600 pages) and so ghastly (I’m not even going to start, but it was more than 20 years ago and the thing is still seared into my memory) that I eventually had to just scrape the surface like I was skimming fat off the bottom of a roasting pan.

(And I actually met the, erm, author a couple of years later, at a screenwriting class taught by a producer I used to work for at Chuck Fries Productions. She was everything you’d have expected from reading that oeuvre.)

These days I don’t usually bother scanning a book—either I read it or I dump it after a few pages. Although I occasionally flip through the James Fennimore Cooper descriptive passages to get to some actual, you know, action.

(Many, many years ago my father described Cooper’s writing style as being, “One Indian comes up to another and says, ‘How.' Then there are six pages of description of the weather, the woods, the wildlife and the beads they were wearing that came from Woolworth’s, and then the other Indian says, ‘How.’” I did not agree with my old man about much of anything, but when I finally picked up The Last of the Mohicans, I had to confess that he was right about that.

(I still read the whole damned thing.)

But then, I’m what Crossen refers to as a “fast reader”. Back in the day, I could read a feature film script (typically 120 pages) in an hour, and most novels in three to five. (In that day, I was being paid $50 per script and minimum of $75 per book.) My former roommate tried covering a couple of properties and reckoned that between the reading, analysis and writing the report, she was making about $5 per hour.

These days I sometimes drift off and then have to return for reinforcement (one reason why I can’t deal with an audio book—a sentence, a concept, a phrase will set me off on a tangent and if the book is on a CD I can’t rewind and find where I went astray), so I’m a little slower, but I still go through a few books a week.

Well, Bodyguard of Lies took me a hair under three weeks. And I did skip maybe about the equivalent of 50 pages. But in a 900-page book of considerable density, that’s not completely dishonorable.

Generally I stick with it, because I mostly read non-fiction, and if you skip chunks, you miss more than a plot point or two. The writer doesn’t care whether I ingest every word in the book or not, as long as someone’s paid for the privilege of me opening it. But I’m reading it to learn, and to skim would be cheating myself out of that knowledge.

Where I do skip shamelessly is TV, with my DVR. It's not just fast forwarding through the commercials; or even whizzing past the segments of a movie I've seen before that I know to be lest than enthralling.

The other night I hit FF4 through considerable parts of Eat Pray Love. The blah-blah ones, where Liz is reliving her disintegrating relationships, and then where the scars of those breakups threaten True Lasting Love (and would change the movie title to Eat Pray Bromo.)

That cut about 50 minutes out of the 2:30 total run time and made it almost tolerable.