Too much code - slicing

[AK]

On 09/19/2010 10:32 PM, John Bokma wrote:
> AK<andrei.avk at gmail.com>  writes:
>
>> On 09/19/2010 07:18 PM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
>>> AK wrote:
>>>
>>>> Afaik the idea is that you can read a novel at the speed of half a page
>>>> a second or so and understand it to the same extent as people who'd read
>>>> at a normal rate.
>>>
>>> I've never understood why anyone would *want* to read a
>>> novel that fast, though. For me at least, reading a novel
>>> is something done for pleasure, so reading it at ten times
>>> normal speed would waste 90% of the benefit.
>>>
>>
>> One definite advantage would be that if, say, it takes you 70 pages of a
>> given novel to figure out whether you like it enough to continue, you'd
>> want to read those pages in 2 minutes rather than an hour.
>
> Heh, to me speed reading those 70 pages in a very short while,
> concluding that it's a good book, and start over again would be quite
> the spoiler. Do you fast forward movies as well?

I honestly doubt it would be a spoiler if it's a good book. Generally I
find that poor books rely on twists and turns while better ones rely on
the fabric of story-telling. Aside from that, though, it's a very
interesting question - I'll try to think of good books and see if they'd
be spoiled by peeking in the first 70 pages.. Starting with children's
books, Peter Pan and Wind in the Willows, I think, would not be. Don
quixote would not be. Crime and punishment - maybe if you get as far as
the murder? Same author's the Devils, I would say you can read the last
70 pages and it'd be just as good :). -ak