Pick up your phone and your thumb starts moving before you have decided anything. A headline, a video, another headline. Ten minutes later, if someone asked what you had read, you might remember two titles. Perhaps three.
That is not a failing of yours. Most pages on a screen are built to be finished quickly: short lines, a large picture, and another link waiting at the bottom. The page does not want you to stop.
So what does a reader get by going slowly?
A sentence read twice
In good writing, some sentences slip past the first time. Read them again and they hold you. Why did the writer choose that word? Why does the sentence end there, and not one clause later? These questions only come when you give a page more time than it asks for.
Food works the same way. Eat in a hurry and you are full, but you could not say what the dish tasted of. Eat one mouthful at a time and you can tell how much tamarind went into the rasam, and how much jaggery.
Speed is a school habit
At school we learn to read fast, because exams are short and the syllabus is long. That is fair. But at home, on a quiet evening, nobody is timing you. If one page takes five minutes, let it take five minutes. Nobody is giving marks.
A page can help, or get in the way
None of this makes the screen the enemy. Type that is large enough, lines that are not too long, wide margins, and nothing blinking at the side: with those, a screen can be as calm as a book. That is the whole idea behind the theme this site is drawn in. It asks nothing of you except reading.
The one thing to keep
Reading slowly is not reading less. It is keeping more of what you read.
Tonight, before you sleep, read one page. Slowly. The way you would taste a good rasam.