Reading slower on purpose

Four pages last night, in about forty minutes. Writing that down is embarrassing. For most of this year I've read the way I scroll — eyes moving, nothing landing. I'd finish a chapter, and could tell you its topic but not one sentence from inside it. So this week I've been doing something that feels almost stupid: read a paragraph, put the book face-down, say the paragraph back to myself in my own words, then turn it over. Four pages, forty minutes. But a day later I can still tell you what the argument was and where I thought it was thin. The strange part is how uncomfortable it is. In the middle of every paragraph there's a pull to just keep going, and it isn't curiosity — it's the feeling of falling behind. Behind what, though. Nobody is counting my pages. I won't do this with everything. But I'd like to know which books I'm reading in order to have read them, and which ones I want actually inside me. That's a different question from whether the book is any good.