Is A Book Read at Lightning Speed Necessarily Good?

I read Catching Fire, the second Hunger Games novel, last week in about two-and-a-half-days, which for me is very fast. Usually, I like to mull over a book for a while, let myself get distracted as I'm reading it and have my train of thought choo-choo off into the distance as ideas inspired by the work flood my mind and make the words on the page go blurry before me, but I devoured Catching Fire like a dingo does a baby. Page after page flew by in my desperation to find out what happened next, and every time I got to the last page of a chapter, however much I tried to fix my eyes to the line I was reading they flew down to read the last sentence, and the inevitable cliffhanger meant I just had to keep reading.

At first I marvelled at how some books inspire this compulsive readability, this all-consuming need to push on and on until there's nothing left of the story, and I puzzled over how I could bring this insatiability to my own work. But then I realised that this might not always be such a great thing. I like the fact that a lot of books I read have asides that make me pause for thought, that they have plots that demand contemplation, that I live in a book for a week or two and get completely consumed by the story and characters, that the sentences are constructed with such care that sometimes I have to read them a second time to get their full meaning and entire benefit of their wisdom. With Catching Fire the words flew by in a  blur, there were no clever and intricate metaphors and pause-for-thought moments, everything was just geared towards making you want to finish it as soon as possible and move on to the next one.

Even as I read Catching Fire I was aware of the flaws in it: that the two male lead characters are very similar, that the book can occasionally be cringey in its descriptions of sexual feelings and relationships, that really there's not much need for the events of the book to take place at all. But that doesn't mean it isn't a thrilling, five-star read, packed with fun and excitement. In fact, if it was a bit more complex and challenging these problems might be bigger stumbling blocks, could take some of the shine off the story's juggernautical brilliance. As it is though, I read Catching Fire so quickly that all I could think at the end was "wow, that's cool" and now I've moved on to a Steinbeck that makes me stare out of the window and contemplate society. It's almost as if books you read really quickly and books you don't are two different art-forms, and each remind you just how great the other is.