Romance Novels: Meth of the Reading World

I read three books yesterday. Start to finish, cover to cover. Three. Admittedly, it's not like I was reading War and Peace or The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or something (I read a romance novel and two books by Meggin Cabot, who isn't exactly difficult), but I did probably read about 900 pages. Let's see if we can figure out a rate...started at noon, finished Book Number 1 (~300 pages) at 2. Picked up Book Number 2 (~250 pages) at 3:30, finished at 5. Started Book Number 3 (~350 pages) at 11:30 p.m., finished at 1:30. That's...five and a half hours to read nine hundred pages. Five and a half hours is 330 minutes. That's almost 3 pages a minute. That seems a little fast—I think the actual rate is somewhere around 2 pages a minute, so my figures might be a little off.

Still, I'd like to know why I can't read that fast at school. Probably because treatises on pre-historical iron development or the future of American theatre aren't quite as fascinating as Boy Next Door, the first e-mail novel I've ever read (fabulous, by the way—a hip update of the epistolary novel we all love). I am trying to decide if I would trade my ability to speed-read during vacation for faster reading during the semester. The answer? A resounding "no" because if I did trade them, I would read a lot more boring crap during the semester and a lot less interesting crap during break. And really, who wants to learn more than necessary?