I once saw an interview with novelist Philip Roth where he said something along the lines of, “If you take more than two weeks to read a book, you haven’t really read it.”

This—with the caveat that there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to read and you should read at the speed that’s comfortable for you, Philip Roth be damned—has always seemed right to me. When I take longer than two weeks to read a book, the fictional dream of a novel’s world begins to break up like melting ice on a river, and I start to lose my grip on the novel’s plot, characters, and ideas. I lose momentum. I lose interest. I have to force myself to finish; I reestablish contact with the book only through an act of will, reading to the end with white knuckles. Often, I quit the book completely.

Of course, sometimes it goes the other way: I take longer than two weeks to read because I stop liking the book, because a promising premise goes nowhere in the second half, or a compelling plot falls apart—the list goes on. Other times, the slowness of my reading actually causes a book I otherwise would have liked to merely seem bad. Either way, the point is that, for me, the two week rule holds true. If I take longer than that to read a book, I haven’t really read it.

In fact, for me, reading even faster than two weeks is optimal. I usually average about 35-40 books a year, which translates to about a week and a half per book on average; this year, I’m going for 52 for the very first time, one book a week. There are variances in there, of course—one book will take longer than a week, then I’ll blow through another in two days. Often, the very best reading experiences are those that take only a day. And a single sitting is the Holy Grail of reading experiences.

You’ll see this sometimes in online book reviews—”I read it in one day!” “I read it in two sittings!” The implication here is generally left unstated because it’s so obvious: reading that fast is an indicator of an ironclad connection between a book and the mind of its reader, of the right person finding the right story at just the right time and taking such delight in it that they literally can’t put the book down. These experiences are rare and precious in the life of a reader—though they’re not always pleasant. My single-sitting-reads include Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Emma Donoghue’s Room; I read these books in a feverish state, as if the stories were a sickness I needed to sweat out of my body. I was literally afraid to put down the book, to break the fictional dream even for a moment—I think I feared that if I did, something awful would happen to the characters while I was away. (If you’ve read either of these books, I think you know what I’m talking about)

Still, is there any benefit to reading slowly? Is the two-week rule really ironclad? Must readers be subservient to an imperative of speed?

On July 14, we started reading Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road as part of our very first Stake Reading Club. Today is July 29, more than two weeks after we started reading. And I haven’t finished the book—I’m about three-fourths of the way through. The novel is about 300 pages long, the kind of book I’d normally finish in a week or less. It’s not because The Girl in the Road is long or especially difficult that I’m breaking my two-week rule. The Stake Reading Club was designed to read books slowly, deliberately, closely—to savor each chapter and think deeply about it, alone and together, as we go.

And the results? Well, I’m pleased to say that reading The Girl in the Road slowly isn’t ruining it. Part of that may be that though I’m reading slowly I’m also reading deliberately—I read a bit every day, always making contact with the world Monica created, rather than in fits and starts, as I so often have with past failed reads. This time, though I’m reading slowly, my attention to the book and my connection with it is sustained rather than haphazard: sustained through regular reading, and thought, and discussion with my fellow readers.

But still. I read reviews of The Girl in the Road on Goodreads in which readers report having finished the book in a matter of days, or one day, or one sitting, and I can’t help but wonder: what if? What have I lost by not letting my interest in the narrative—which is real—carry me forward to the end at the speed it prefers? The experience of reading is a complicated one; we often talk about whether we “liked” a book, whether it was “good” or “bad,” but most of us know deep down that these words are just the tip of a huge iceberg, words we use to represent a place of intersection: the place where the settled qualities of a book collide with the subjective mind of a reader and the shifting sands of circumstance. What would this book have been to me if I was in a different mindset when I’d picked it up? If I read it at 20, 30, 80? If I read it slower, if I read it faster?

There’s an analogue here to television series, which are stories most often consumed slowly, in weekly chunks. Single episodes are dissected, discussed ad nauseum on Twitter as they air and on sites like this one the day after. The results are, often, sublime—it turns out there’s a lot of complexity in a single chapter of a story, layers that are missed when entire series or seasons are gulped whole. As derided as TV recaps often are, there’s sense to this slow-motion analysis, to unpacking each episode, each scene, each beat with as much care as went into its creation. That’s true of The Girl in the Road too. Monica Byrne built so many layers into her text. She spent so much time on each sentence, each word. She (probably) read it over and over again, until her eyes bled. Isn’t reading her book with a little bit of care the least we can do?

Something is gained with this kind of reading, and something is lost. The pleasure of slow, deliberate analysis is real; but what is lost, often, is the pure pleasure of story, the headlong rush of a plot that moves toward its conclusion in a way that you can’t help but follow. This is true even in TV, a medium built for slow consumption in which speed is given a dubious and slightly judgmental word: binging. When it comes to stories, it’s sometimes best to binge. Fictional worlds are made to be experienced, to be lived in. They beg for us to enter them wholly and unreservedly.

I’m enjoying my slow read of The Girl in the Road. But someday, I’m coming back to the book. And this time, I’m going to read it fast.