The first book I PR'd was "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" (it's popular right now and the author even has a tape course on TV called "choose to be rich") and I couldn't get the "aha" feeling to save my life. I thought that I was doing something wrong so I just slow read the book and found out THERE WAS NOTHING I DIDN'T ALREADY KNOW in it. It was just a bunch of 1980's real estate garbage I had already read before surrounded by a moronic story that put me to sleep. No wonder there was no "aha." I didn't like it. Everyone knows to buy real estate and rent it out and set up a Nevada Corporation and pay your expenses out before paying your taxes but in the town where I live there are more rental properties than people to rent them to and I suspect that's a problem everywhere else too. I got that all from PRing the book but felt there had to be more to it and there wasn't.
Why don't you try an experiment. First, make your purpose to look for what you already know about OR don't care about. Then make your purpose to look for things you do want to know about or don't know about yet. That's 3 passes in the book already- 1 for PR, 1 for what you don't want and 1 for what you do want. Then rapid read and blast thru what you don't care about and slow down on what you do care about. That's what I do now and a 200 page book takes about an hour and I not only find what I need but still take extra time with things here and there.
Another thing that may be bothering you is the way they say to do SuperReading/Dipping and Skittering. A problem I had with "MegaSpeedReading" was I went nuts trying to follow my hand down the page. Then I skipped the hand and just zigzagged my eyes down the page. Still wasn't getting much but in doing that over and over I did start to end the subvocalizing and was able to learn by seeing but it still wasn't that fast even though I did it for a couple years. Superreading and Skittering reminded me of that and I didn't want to do that again so I started reading (by rhythmic perusal- skimming the tops of the words as if I was skiing over them) the first sentence of every paragraph then moved my eyes either down the center of the page or zigzagged down to the start of the next paragraph. This is the way I rapid read now. Now that I know what I care about and don't care about I can adjust my speed here. If I were to do this at the beginning without Pring or doing the other steps nothing would make ANY sense at all and I'd get nothing- which was exactly what happened to me with speedreading before. If I read the first sentence (sometimes I just read the first line and still got the drift of the whole sentence) and something hits me as important, I continue rhythmicly perusing the whole paragraph, if nothing strikes me as important I just scan down the paragraph and start over with the next paragraph. I also stop and read quotes, italic words, bullets and things that are numbered like in "steps" to do something but still then half the time you only need to read the topic paragraph to see if you don't know it already.
On page 28 of the manual (it's the second page of a practice article) there are 2 columns that are all numbered paragraphs and it's pretty obvious that they are important but you can still vary speed depending on whether you need it or don't care about it. For instance I'm familiar with 1 thru 5 but 6 was new to me so I slowed down for that one and speeded up again when I was done with it and back to something I was familiar with. Before I would have read every word at the same speed and wasted lots of time- but I wouldn't have thought I wasted time because I was doing what I was taught. Now I know better.
I guess what I do is dip fast frequently because I can't stand just moving my eyes hoping for things to jump out at me. I guess if I tried to do that I wouldn't like this either.
Another thing I do (without thinking about it) is look at the white space around the words instead of the words themselves when I read. That's like combining Photoreading with Rapid Reading in one shot. When you move your eyes pretend the white space is flowing like water around the words. Sometimes I can't tell what the heck I'm doing- rhythmic perusal or white space reading or just seeing everything at once or what. Once you know what you want and don't want anything's pretty fast compared to the alternative. If you come across something completely new to you can spend more time with it since you aren't spending the same amount of time wading thru the garbage getting there.
