We live in an era that rewards speed. We skim articles, scan headlines, and swipe through feeds at a pace that would have baffled readers even a generation ago. The written word, once something to be savored, has become something to be consumed — quickly, efficiently, and in ever-greater quantities. But there is a cost to this velocity, one that reveals itself slowly, in the growing sense that we have read everything and understood nothing.

Slow reading is not a technique so much as a disposition. It asks that we approach a text the way we might approach a long walk through unfamiliar terrain: without hurry, with attention to detail, and with a willingness to be surprised. It means reading a paragraph twice if the first pass felt rushed. It means pausing to consider a metaphor rather than racing past it toward the next plot point. It means, above all, treating the act of reading as an end in itself rather than a means to some other goal.

The practice has its roots in older traditions of close reading and lectio divina, but it need not be academic or spiritual. A novel read slowly on a park bench, a poem revisited across several mornings, an essay lingered over with a cup of coffee — these are all acts of slow reading. What they share is an insistence on presence, a refusal to let the mind wander ahead of the words on the page.

There is something countercultural about choosing to read slowly today. It is a small act of resistance against the tyranny of productivity, a quiet declaration that not everything worth doing needs to be done quickly. In slowing down, we may find that we not only read better but think better — and that the books we thought we knew have more to say than we ever realized.