Speed Reading - Day 1

Good Reading speed seems to be , in all most everyone's opinion , the surest way of cracking the VA section in the much talked about CAT exam. After days of procastrination yours truly finally , and this is largely due to the spanking new "CL packet -2" which has just arrived, decided to test waters in this territory. Now here i must tell the amused reader that i always thought myself to be a "decent enough" reader. I have been reading books since maybe the 3rd standard. A self proclaimed authority on enid blyton,sidney sheldon , jeff archer and the likes, i started "How to master the art of Reading Comprehension" with a smug smile. Ah, i thought to myself such books are for the naive souls who havent touched a novel in their wasted lives and enlightened beings such as myself, who have been having books as their best friends since childhood, need only to read them as leisure. Or so i thought. What started as a casual leisurely go at a "diagnostic test" of a given RC became a nightmare.Read the following para in under a minute and answer the questions , it said.Hah..i thought, such a teeny tiny para and a whole minute ..i might get the pop corn as well. Anyways started reading the para , nicely written i wondered, some greek mythology stuff, a lot of unpronouncable names and a few realtions like this guy killed that guy and all. Ok fine , finished reading it, checked the stop watch..shucks 1 min 27 secs. My goodness ..!! thats well past the stipulated time but anyways lets hit the questions i thought.After scratching my head for a whole minute with the questions , i got only 6 out of 10 correct. But the inner "avid reader" tag inside me was refusing to relent. No maybe this was one of those out of the blue, much below the median , unreflecting of your true position, performances .Lets try the next one I said to myself. The next passage was from zoology.Ah finally some science ..science is good. Come on have to reedeem myself in this one. Started reading it ,but whats this ..so many numbers , like x number of species of this and y number of species of that are known. Good God..!! somehow i finish the passage and check the time 1 min 38 seconds. Talk about improvement i had in fact deterioted and that too in one of my interest areas.What the world is coming to ? My poor heart exclaimed.No probs , the optimist in me shouted out ,lets hit the questions.Finally after attempting the 10 odd questions and checking the scores only 7 correct. So RC section is all togther a different ball game then.Atleast i can find solace in fact that i have identified the problem early and the only way to go from here is up..!!Loads of reading coming up for me in the coming weeks and all the fixation ,enlarging eye span ,skimming and so on, techniques are going to find a regular user..any good reads anyone ?