I'm reading books different way than people I know. I'm skipping many fragments, I think I read maybe 10% of the whole text. This applies to fiction and technical books as well.

I'm doing this automatically, without thinking about it, some time ago I've discovered this, when at 2nd reading of the book I've stumbled at a fragment that made my understanding of the whole story "reevaluate" :) Somehow I've missed the fragment before, and the whole book made less sense.

I've tried to understand how my brain decides what to skip, and the heuristic is sth like this - read all things that starts with "-" (dialogs are the most important), beginning of the paragraphs, and the places that have many whitespaces, skip most of the other text, if you don't know what you are reading about - think for a while to deduce what's going on, if you don't know - go back and read more. That's not the whole heuristic, but that's what I can easily notice.

Especially the skill to "wait for a few pages to see if something you don't know yet will explain by itself, or can be deduced from what you know" is usefull. That way I read faster than most people I know, and I'm good at quickly learning material for exams (but without using the information I quickly forget what I've read. I even don't remember sometimes if I've read this book at all - mostly happens with fantasy books - they are all similiar :) ).

I'm also very bad at remembering names of real people and book heroes. I remember them "functionaly" - the one that is the uncle of the bad guy, etc.