Free Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words by David Butler

them, a morning star of hope, our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
    And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
    And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
    The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.
    During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2…

Chapter 5: Skills
    Every skill requires practice, but some strategies exist that can boost any practice to maximum effectiveness—and some of these strategies are especially suited to reading skills. A little consideration of these strategies before continuing with the exercises will be time well-spent.
    Force vs. Technique
    Watch students of martial arts, and you will often see them practicing their moves in slow motion. It doesn’t look very powerful because they are moving so slowly, but what they are doing is perfecting their form and improving their technique. They know that power comes more from technique than from physical force. This same principle of technique over force applies to reading.

    Instead of the brute force method of simply trying to push yourself to read faster, real reading power can be achieved by concentrating on techniques to learn to read text as a flow of ideas rather than a string of words. It’s mastering this skill that gives power to your reading. If learning a physical skill like martial arts requires careful attention to technique, then it shouldn’t be surprising that this is also true of something as complex as reading.
    Practice
    "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."
    —Vince Lombardi
    Practice only creates habits , and these habits can be good, bad, or mediocre. Therefore, the type of practice you choose to engage in is much more important than the amount.
    Consider the skill of typing as an example. When people first learn to type, they usually improve quickly until they can type without looking at the keys. But after learning to "touch-type," they soon reach a plateau. No matter how much more they practice, they still don’t type any faster. Even if they type every day for a living, all that practice doesn’t continue to