It started with this. And, yesterday Barkha commented about how 2010 has turned out to be a "good book year" for me. Over the years I've had folks remark about my reading habits and "how fast you read". Till the time Runa pointed out long ago that the book reading was actually a bit odd, I've never considered that I was a "fast reader". That is because I had to look at my Mum and anytime I saw her finish a book and then saw how much time I took to finish it - I was "slow". Anyway, this post is more because I have over the years promised a lot of folks about writing down about my reading habits and so forth.

For a small number of years after my birth I had to live outside the country - the parents were trying their level best to set up a better life for the family and, India wasn't the most promising place to do that. An aspect of living outside was that I grew up within a fairly mixed bag environment. And, somehow, since my mother seems to have always been a bookworm, I was lucky enough to grow up in houses where piling up books wasn't frowned upon. What was not encouraged was not reading them or, reading them but not talking about them. You get the drift - sooner rather than later, reading a book a day was the best way to end it. Which is probably the reason I ended averaging 6-7 books a week (do that math for per month and multiply it by around 6 years and you realize the tragedy of packing and moving). Since most books were borrowed from libraries and I really really wanted to cram as many books I could read (I salute and remain thankful to each and every librarian I encountered who just indulged in my silly game of borrow_today_read_return_tomorrow) I ended up reading books really quickly. And, there are shades of that habit mentioned in this blog entry.

So, once Runa did point out that I was being a bit unusual, I tried to observe what I did. Here's a rough list:

• I can read texts written in English at a fairly rapid pace and keep switching between text types/content types
• I can hold a thread of commentary/notes/review of the text I am reading while going through it
• The above doesn't work for Bengali and Hindi. In fact, for Bengali I've been known to go back and forth over the same paragraph
• I generally read nearly a page at a time. What this means is that children start reading a character at a time, progress to a word at a time and thereafter to a sentence and a paragraph. I seem to be able to read larger chunks fairly easily.
• I cannot seem to do an equally quick job of reading when I am reading off the screen (desktops/laptops)

And that is all there is to it really. The habit of book reading that I caught fairly early seems to be the main reason for all of this. The downside is that it is an obsessive thing though - these days I need to read some new content (preferably book/monograph/article) daily or else feel like a good old grump through the day.