There is a particular pleasure in resisting the urge to rush through a book — in sitting with a sentence, turning it over, letting it mean more than it first appears.

We live in an age that rewards speed. Summaries, skimming, the two-minute explainer. But books resist this. The ones worth reading, anyway. They ask something of you: patience, attention, a willingness to be changed slowly rather than quickly.

I've been thinking about this since I reread The Brothers Karamazov last winter, taking nearly three months over it. I had read it before, in a rush of enthusiasm in my early twenties, and retained almost nothing — a vague sense of grandeur, a few character names. This time I read twenty pages a day and stopped when something struck me.

What I found was that the book had been waiting for me to slow down. Dostoevsky's sentences are long and argumentative; they circle back on themselves, revise, contradict. Reading quickly, you skate across them. Reading slowly, you fall in.

This is not a prescription for everyone. Some books want to be devoured. But I think most readers, myself included for years, default to speed without ever choosing it — never pausing to ask whether this book, this paragraph, this sentence, might reward a second look.

The answer is almost always yes.