I read quite well, but the speed and retention is entirely based on my interest in the subject. Animal Farm, like 30 min and good retention. Great Expectations, hour or so for 120 pages and crap retention. I thought one of the tricks or speed reading is to only read the first sentence of each paragraph? If so, you might be accidentally not reading the book completely or effectively.<p>One has to be trained to read and then reading skill must be practiced. For lectures, I’ve found taking notes by hand provides both a memory and a synthesis of the talk but it’s hard when both are complex.