| Depends exactly how slow. In high school, I had a lot of reading to do, but it was never too much that I couldn't do all of it (most of my friends didn't do it at all), so when college came around, I had to rethink my ways a little bit. Some slips of advice:
1) The "mop-up" method, I find, works particularly well with literature. The important thing is not what's happening; it's the mechanics that make what's happening happening. That's when ye trusty underlining tool comes in super-handy. (Also, maybe just me, but I find reading literature really fun, even if I can't remember plots for the life of me).
2) Don't expect to understanding heavyweights like Marx and Kant on the first time around. Anybody who takes Self for sosc knows that about 150 pages of Durkheim has the rough exchange value of 20 pages of Marx. The readings on the heavyweights are often shorter to account for their density, and you can't expect yourself to get it on the first round. That's what class discussion is for. And office hours. And the essay.
3) In classes like sociology, political science, etc., where the reading assignments are pages and pages, the articles are usually set up in a very clear structure, allowing for easy skimming. Sociologists and political scientists and the like like to summarize their arguments-- a lot-- in different ways, so following along is not super-hard and not every detail is important if you're just looking for what the argument is, not evidence that supports it. I found that my sociology professor often gave better and clearer lectures on the readings than the readings did of explaining themselves.... so I found readings for that class largely, ahem, optional. |