What it all means
As a recovering English major, I sometimes just like to read for the hell of it, enjoy the story and not worry too much about literary merit or what any of the stuff might symbolize. Moby Dick, after all, is a great yarn about high seas adventures. But, then again, you’re missing something if you don’t also ponder what it is has to to say about God and the existence of evil (which is nothing particularly uplifting; Melville will never make the Oprah book club).
When I write reviews, I have to wear my English major hat, and frequently I realize that I missed something that I might not otherwise have considered if I were just reading for amusement and didn’t have to think about it in an attempt to say something semi-interesting that might actually be helpful to someone who may not have read the work in question, or read it the same way I did.
I actually like reading some literary criticism, but what I can’t stand are critics who suffer from “what I’m saying is more important than what the text is actually saying” syndrome. And, sometimes, I just don’t feel like working that hard. Case in point is this post at the blog for Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I think I understand Niall Harrison’s responses more than I understand the points taken from Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory though, not having read the book (nor do I intend to) that’s probably my shortcoming, not his.
I don’t consider myself a fast reader, though I must be someone’s definition of fast. I started reading early, and was always something of a bookworm as a child, but I was never one of those kids who could sit down a read a whole novel in a few hours. In other words, I don’t have any special powers or prodigy-level talents, and what reading speed I have managed to develop has only really emerged later in life, and only with effort. 
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Surprised by the dust on all those books you ‘just bought’ but haven’t gotten to yet? To-be-read pile threatening to topple and crush you under its weight? Tired of being left out of conversations about authors you haven’t read yet? Me too. All of this is common enough for any bibliophile, to varying degrees or another, and its nice that we can commiserate. That is, most of us can, but not all of us, for there is a strange breed that lives among us with the book-lover’s equivalent of superpowers — the hyperspeed reader.