@Matt M. — Congratulations on paying off your mortgage! That's awesome. I also used to have a lot of trouble with reading and in fact was far below average all the way through college. To be specific, I was at 174wpm when the average is 240wpm (1 word per quarter second). I also had very little recall and recognition which meant that when I got through a book, I didn't know what I read. To solve that dramatic deficit, I picked up the Evelyn Wood Reading Program from Nightingale-Conant which I noticed is not there any longer, but they do offer another speed reading program which I'm sure is just as good and that you can find here. It took me about two or three months to get through all of the lessons, but by the time I was done, I had gone from 174wpm to 1,750wpm, learned an enormous amount about reading in general, and had made significant gains in my recall and recognition ability. I cannot recommend studying speed reading enough and myself would like to repeat another course and do it again. I don't speed read any longer, but the skills I learned have stuck with me, and I am able to read several books every year which I notice has made a world of difference. Last year I read 70 non-fiction books, and this year I'm on track to clear 50. Another significant source of information came from a book I found that was written (I think) in 1941 by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren called HOW TO READ A BOOK. While there were entire chapters that I could barely follow because of how dense they were (this is not a remedial read by a long shot), I cannot think of anything that has improved my ability to read more than this book has. The first time I read it, I immediately put it down, got in my car and drove to Barnes & Noble, bought HAMLET, read it through, and understood it. The Adler/Van Doren book argues that the most difficult form of reading you can do is poetry, a format they urge you to master. Going further, they say the most difficult form of poetry to read is Shakespeare, and the more you read it, they say, the better and sharper your reading skills become. I completely agree that they were correct in both of those assertions and have gone on to read the book two more times with each time improving my reading abilities once again. In fact, I will be happy to read it once more in a couple of years because of the benefits I have realized each time through. By the way, if you don't know who Charles Van Doren is (you might recognize the name somewhere in the back of your mind), he was the academic portrayed by Ralph Feinnes in the film QUIZSHOW about the 1950s gameshow scandal where they were giving Charles Van Doren the answers to the questions they asked him while he was in the isolation booth. It's a pretty interesting story if you don't know about it. With those two excellent tools—speed reading and HOW TO READ A BOOK—I would say that you will more than improve your ability to read whatever level you are at right now, and in fact reading will probably become the activity that you most enjoy as it has become for me. Finally, in HOW TO READ A BOOK, they talk about something called "synoptical reading," which is a process where you read several books on the same topic, such as ten or more, let's say. When you do this, as they explain, your brain starts to make connections to all of the different books that are not actually written or found in any of the books. They claim it's the highest form of reading you can do, and something I've tried on several topics, a skill I have found incredibly useful and even more important that the speed at which you read, something I haven't prioritized in a long time and why I'm not at 1,750wpm any longer (I also don't like to pace which is where you fly your finger across the lines of text like the Matt Damon character does in GOOD WILL HUNTING, which if that were real, it is what reading at 5,000wpm looks like. It's a kind of place you can only get to once you've read several books on the same topic, and as it's argued that it's a place where you can find your true original genius.
