There is a particular quality of attention that emerges only when we slow down. Not the scattered focus of skimming headlines, nor the passive absorption of scrolling through feeds, but something deeper — a willingness to sit with a sentence, to let it unfold in its own time, to hear the rhythm of the language before rushing toward meaning.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." If that is true, then slow reading is perhaps the most generous thing we can do for an author — and for ourselves. It is the act of giving our full presence to another mind's work.

"In the case of the best books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

— Mortimer J. Adler

Consider what happens when you read a paragraph twice. The first pass captures the surface meaning — the who, what, where. But the second pass reveals the architecture. You begin to notice choices: why this word instead of that one, why the sentence breaks where it does, how the rhythm of the prose mirrors its content. You stop consuming and start conversing.

This is not efficiency. The modern world has little patience for re-reading. We are trained to extract information, to mine text for data points and key takeaways, to reduce a book to its bullet-pointed summary. But a book is not a dataset. A poem is not a memo. The meaning lives not just in the words but in the spaces between them, in the silences the author chose to leave.

I keep a commonplace book — a plain notebook where I copy out passages that arrest me. The act of writing by hand forces a different kind of attention. The hand is slower than the eye, and in that delay, something happens. The words pass through you differently. They become, in some small way, yours.

The bookshop smelled of old paper and patience. Dust motes floated in the window light like the thoughts of every reader who had ever stood in that spot, turning pages.

Perhaps the greatest argument for slow reading is simply this: there is more than enough to read in a lifetime, but there is never enough time to read well. The question is not how much we can consume, but how deeply we are willing to be changed. A single book, truly read, is worth more than a hundred books skimmed.

So here is my modest proposal: choose one book this month. Read it slowly. Read it in the morning, with coffee, before the day begins its demands. Underline the sentences that surprise you. Copy the paragraphs that move you. Let the book take as long as it needs. There is no deadline. There is no quiz.

There is only the quiet space between you and the page.