https://www.theguardian.com/books/b ooksblog/2009/dec/14/you

I really have to doubt he was able to turn the pages that quickly with his chubby sausage fingers.

Oh shit, maybe he wasn't lying when he counted 'dozens' of the phrase 'stretched his legs' in the book Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone and has just become senile?
Maybe he has dementia and marked his envelope, went back to the page, saw 'stretched his legs', marked it again and so on.

>>9941167
"Stretched his legs" doesn't even appear once though.

>>9941172
ok fine then 'stretch his legs'

>17 rounded seconds per page

I call BS on that one.

>http://radioopensource.org/at-home-with-harold-bloom-2-on-the-humanities
>the 1000p/h claim actually originates from himself and isn't some whisper game misunderstanding
holy meme

>>9941159
>he could churn through 1,000 pages an hour, which means he could have digested Jane Eyre during his lunch break and still had time to chew through half of Ulysses before returning to classes
All of that is true if we define reading as turning pages. I too can turn a lot of pages in an hour just idly looking here and there on the pages. That doesn't mean I've read more than a few lines per page after finishing my page-turning exercise. And it certainly doesn't mean I've digested the content of books I've idly browsed any more than I can digest a piece of cake that I haven't even eaten.

>reading quickly
>not re-reading almost every sentence to analyse the construction the paragraph
Pleb-tier

I can pretty much do the same, but doing so means you can't really absorb or understand the literature. You're just memorising words

>>9941159
Sounds like watching Tarkovsky in x2. What's the point?

>>9941164
>>9942522
>>9942507
>>9942492
>>9941612
>brainlets in denial
hilarious

>>9941159
>1,000 pages an hour
3.6 second per page.

>>9941612
Bloom is able to comprehend a text better after several minutes than you will have seven months of close reading and research. I'm sorry but its just a fact
There are the Usain Bolts of this world and then there is the rest of us

>>9941159
One day I hope to be able to skim books almost as fast as this dude.

>>9942551
Why did he think Harry Potter had dozens of mentions of the phrase "stretch his legs" whenever a character took a walk when that wasn't true in reality? Doesn't sound like he's actually reading successfully.

>>9942563
He was obviously speaking metaphorically

>>9941159
>aestheticism
Autism.

>>9942570
The relatively few times where the phrase is used weren't even in reference to walking like he said though.

File: 1492853212502.jpg (15KB, 300x225px) Image search: [Google]

15KB, 300x225px

>BTFO'ing Harry Potter so hard that /lit/ is still reeling years later

>>9941159
>3 seconds per page
Bullshit. It's possible if you skim through useless information (like when you read long academic papers or court decisions), but no way you can enjoy Flaubert at this speed.

>>9942570
is he speaking metaphorically about his reading speed though?

I mean that's the kind of shit that fucks me up. that Good Will Hunting type shit.

>>9942578

Iirc someone suggested it was the clichéd movement. Stretched legs being just an example.

>>9943554
Yeah, he should have spent 20 minutes of his time to reread the whole book (sarcasm) and find an actual example. You can't take him seriously anymore, if that's not true.

(Disclaimer: I have not read Harry Potter.)

Seriously, the guy lies about having actually read the 1st harry potter book and became so obsessed with a shitty fantasy book that he wrote his own fanfic which turned out terribly, who does he think he is if he thinks his opinion on tastes matters at all?
How can anybody take him seriously?
If he was younger, people would just consider him as a stupid reactionary edgelord.

>>9942551
Pierre Emerick Aubemeyang is faster than Usain Bolt and he's not even a pro sprinter.

>>9943581
a voyage to Arcturus was NOT a shitty fantasy book
:/

I know a guy who actually took a class with Bloom at Yale. He said that Bloom's reading speed and retention was incredible, without exaggerating. He told me that one time, when he met Bloom privately, he brought a piece of writing, an essay or short story or something, I don't remember, and Bloom was able to literally pause, ask for a minute or two of silence, read it completely, and then comment on it brilliantly. The thing is, though, Bloom doesn't purposely try to speed read literature. What he attempts to do, according to what my friend told me, at least, is basically cut through the mediocrity and fluff, which he is able to recognize, (reading quickly and perhaps not as thoroughly as was possible for him) and when he gets to the good stuff, he memorizes it. So Bloom's speed is not impressive on its own sake, because obviously reading literature quickly makes you lose out on so much of it, but impressive because he uses it to play the novel over and over again in his head, so that it is as if he has read it multiple times in the span of time it would take a regular speed reader to read it once and barely retain or appreciate any of it. Bloom's memory and retention in combination with his speed is what makes his mind impressive. My friend also said that Bloom was a surprisingly good-humored, easy-going, even self-deprecating man, and that his passion for literature is infectious.

>>9943680

The way he reads, it makes sense that he hates Harry Potter so much. The things that are actually interesting (or would be interesting to an academic) are the WWII allegory stuff, which is more apparent from taking the seven book series as a whole than any one particular passage of prose. Especially with Philosopher's Stone, he probably saw the whole book as filler.

I don't know why he hates DFW so much, though.

>>9943680
>he just reads really fast by skipping over huge chunks of writing he deems lame
I think I finally see his genius.

>>9943701
Read more Freud.

>>9943680
Riiight, your ''friend''. Nice try, Harold.

Should I've been trying to read fast this whole time? I've always made a point to take my time reading, giving equal consideration to every sentence, never skipping a beat. Obviously I read much less because of this. Is Bloom's method better?

>>9943769
Take your time if it's worth it; go fast for lesser artists. What's your actual reading speed?

>>9943784
Took a little test online and it said it was 283wpm.