Speed-reading tips for your holiday book: Don’t “say” words aloud inside your mind while reading and cut distractions that make you re-read sentences, writes Tim Adams for The Guardian. Read in blocks, not in individual words and sentences. The idea was conceived by American teacher Evelyn Wood in the 1950s has been revived just in time for the age of information overload in which we live.

Alternatively: Try tech. There are now apps that claim to make you read faster. “The apps generally use a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which individual words, or blocks of two or three words, appear one after the other in the centre of your screen.” With it, you can read 300, 500, or 1,000 words per minute, and choose the rate at which words appear.” The app Spreeder, for instance, uses this technology. The problem with these methods is that the rhythm of the language is lost in the process. “While it is true that you don’t receive any fresh information in the spaces between words, the research suggests that the millisecond pauses are crucial for cognition: they are our brain’s tiny spaces for reflection,” writes Adams. Studies also show that trying to read more than 600 words per minute means comprehension falls below 75%. “A lot of our lives can be scanned and scrolled and skipped, but reading remains a more immersive kind of act, dependent on detail.”