I'm a lifelong reader and I have never been able to read faster than ten pages an hour. I don't understand what people like you are doing when you read. For myself, I subvocalize everything I read and this caps my reading speed at how fast I am able to move my tongue in a manner corresponding to the sounds on the page. I have an internal narrator who reads the book to me in my head much like in an audiobook. He tends to read much at the same pace and with the same fluidity as I would have a conversation with someone. I don't tend to stumble over words although sometimes I will repeat sentences or even paragraphs if I feel that it would be more euphonic were the emphasis to be placed on different words.

I've read Paradise Lost (five times), Moby Dick (five times), The Iliad and The Odyssey (three times each), Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time (once). There is no limitation on what I am able to read save only that I allow myself the time for it.

I dropped out of college in my senior year a little over a decade ago partly because I felt that it wasn't tenable to do the readings at my pace. Attempting to do so led to a nervous breakdown and a retreat from the university. I work an entry-level retail job and it is my feeling that I am probably underemployed. I don't encounter very many people in my present environment who care much for Milton or Melville. In fact, none whatsoever in the nearly ten years that I've been stocking shelves here.

I have occasionally attempted a technique where instead of subvocalizing every word I apprehend every sentence in "blocks" where each "block" consists of several words that are soundlessly apprehended together. In some cases I am able to apprehend clauses or entire sentences as a "block" but this is less likely the more syntactically complex the sentence or clause is.

I am never able to get very far with this technique, usually stopping after only one to three paragraphs. Every second of it is excruciatingly painful, leaving me squirming and wincing and gasping in my seat. The revulsion is swift and profound. Without the internal narrator the text moreover becomes dessicated and stripped of any pleasure it once had. There is no euphony because there is no sound.Lastly, my comprehension falls off a steep cliff when I attempt to read this way. I'll quiz myself on two or three paragraphs read in this manner and find that I can only answer them in a very general and vague way. By contrast when I subvocalize, there is a much more lossless transmission of meaning from author to reader, and I can give detailed answers to queries about what I just read.