3 good sites for reading
A good site for interesting short passages for reading is Penguin Dossiers. It has articles about, for example, Christmas, Chinese New Year, soccer, James Bond, Christina Ricci, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. They are quite short and reasonably easy to read.
It's difficult to read quickly if you don't know most of the words. Rikai can help you with that. To use rikai, it is best to open 2 tabs in Firefox. In one tab, open an article from Penguin Dossiers that looks interesting. Select and copy the text. In the other tab, open rikai, and paste the text into the window. Then press Go. Move your mouse over any words that look difficult.
Most people read slowly out of habit. Spreeder ("speed reader") can help you do that. Paste the text from the Penguin Dossiers article into Spreeder, and change the settings to about 240 words per minute and chunks of 3 words. Then concentrate as the words appear on the screen. Don't worry if you cannot read all of them.
If 240 words seemed too fast, move the speed UP to 300, and read again. Then go down to 200, and finally back up to 240. Probably it won't seem too fast. Remember you can read 3 times at 300 wpm in the same time it takes to read once at 100 wpm.
