Improved Reading Skills (the opposite of Speed Reading, or is it?)

I've been speaking with my husband this morning about reading. I was complaining to him, as I sometimes feel I complain all the time, that my reading isn't productive in that I can't seem to absorb it so as to do anything with it. Some of this I blame on defects in my memory, but I think the cause has more to do with my inability to argue with a text before staking out my own opinion in relation to it. I read and read and read, but in the end I hardly know what I have read, and in the end this seems to mean that my reading is altogether unproductive, and therefore a waste of time.

I have to read something in order to go to sleep at night, although having replaced our mattress in the last week with a sleep number bed from Select Comfort (so far I've been amazed at how low my number is), I haven't tested to see if reading is still necessary. Right now my book of choice for bedtime reading is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. My best reading? My best reading would come early in the morning as I sit at the table situated on a concrete slab in the backyard. This has happened exactly once since we moved into this house two years ago. There is no ideal reading time for me now, and that's okay, but it does mean that I rarely get the opportunity to focus solely on any one particular text. Beverly described it this morning as a particularly intensive time in the life of my family.

Books can, and often do, represent a certain level of escapism for me, but I have expressed before that I can feel the difference between the experience of reading junk and reading quality literature. I prefer the quality material because even the escapism of a Wilkie Collins novel, like The Law and the Lady has a certain positive value to it, which I cannot unfortunately identify. Though escapist it is still productive. Productivity is not limited to the nonfiction genre

Michael hates to read, yet he reads all the time, and his reading is always productive. He spends his days reading and writing from and on a computer screen, and he uses every bit of information he obtains in one way or another. But for him, reading requires a focused effort. He has to string every word together in his mind, so every text he chooses to read has to somehow show it's worth right up front. The ease with which I have so long experienced reading thereby becomes an impediment to me. It's too easy to gloss over a sentence without taking the time to get even the gist of it before moving on to the next.

This leaves me at a standstill. What must I do now? Because I have this book, this book by Walker Percy, that I expect to discuss tonight, but as it stands now I will only be able to ask questions. I know what he writes about to some extent, but I don't remember what he actually says. And I'm not quite sure where to go from here.

It certainly isn't a hopeless matter, but it is one I need a community to maneuver.