If time were unlimited I don’t know if it would change anything for me; there is still a strong chance I’d skim. Not only am I impatient by nature, there are always other things to be read. I am anxious to get to them.

I skim most when I find prose formulaic or wordy. It’s one thing when the plot leaves you breathless, another when you clearly see what’s coming. Predictability is not a virtue. In the interest of time I feel no compunction about skipping over the slow parts to get to the heart of the action, at the same time wondering why no on-the-ball editor insisted the author cut more in order to speed up the pace.

When reading more satisfyingly complex books I skim much less. I slow down, partly to savor the language and partly to absorb what’s going on. I occasionally backtrack, re-reading paragraphs or entire pages if I don’t think I’ve grasped everything. It’s nice to be able to slow down sometimes; I don’t begrudge a good book the extra time spent reading it. In fact, I wish it happened more often.

It’s both a blessing and a curse there’s so much to be read in the 21st century. Not since the 18th century has it been possible to catch up with reading all the great books. The list of classics, what would later become known as the western canon, was much shorter three centuries ago. Sometime around the 19t.h century, with the rise of the novel, things shifted. It became first difficult, then impossible, to read every major work of literature, no matter how much skimming a reader did.

Now we are bombarded, both with the number of books published annually and the proliferation of instantly available information courtesy of the internet. It’s good to be informed, but there’s no way anyone could keep up with it all.

I can’t help drawing the conclusion there’s no sin in skimming. I wonder how anyone doesn’t do it, how a reader could feel so satisfied with the amount she reads she doesn’t resort to skipping over the extraneous parts. At the same time, I wish for the luxury of time to do justice to every piece of writing I’d like to read. Therein lies the dichotomy, the great, aching wish of the avid reader at once thrilled by the vastness of it all and heartbroken that it’s just out of reach. In love as in book lust, we have not world or time enough.


Lisa Guidarini subsists, almost entirely, on her twin passions of reading and writing (running just ahead of her love for Goose Island beer and Asiago cheese). Her day job, unsurprisingly, is at a public library where she works as Adult Program Coordinator for the Algonquin Area Public Library District. (To this day, she still wonders that people really pay her for the privilege of working in a library.) By evening, she is a graduate student in a distance learning program through the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies. In her spare time she tends to her family, including one husband, three children, and two rambunctious Jack Russell terriers. She also enjoys digital photography, visiting old cemeteries, and the occasional old-fashioned road trip. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she also blogs about anything literary or otherwise interesting. You can reach Lisa at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it