Speed Reading

Though I'm not a slow reader, I'm certainly not a fast one, either. This makes studying for reading-intensive courses extremely long and arduous.

Yes, I know I could use Google, but I'm asking you guys for some help through personal experience:

Do you know of any methods/consumer goods that I could use in order to learn how to read faster, as well as more effectively?

(My brain has decided it's going to suck at English today so if that didn't make sense I'm sorry.)

Quite frankly I think I became a speed reader/typer by playing Maplestory.

(My brain has decided it's going to suck at English today so if that didn't make sense I'm sorry.)

not letting your brain make choices like this for example, making the extra effort every time also raises the bar, so your "average" should improve.

i suck at remembering though, and it pisses me off because i'm failing my course because of that crap.

Read in the bathroom.

Seriously.

Step 1: Get a book
Step 2: Open to any page.
Step 3: Start reading normally and swiftly start speeding up until you're reading as fast as you can. 3 minutes of this is fine. When i say "as fast as you can", i mean to the point where your eyes are moving over the text so fast that you can't really digest anything it's saying.
Step 4: Read normally for a few minutes again.
Step 5: Repeat until satisfied.

How this works is your eye is still processing information while you're moving it even if you can't understand any of it. When you adjust back to normal, your eyes are still trying to read/take in information as fast as it was before resulting in faster average reading speed. This technique is how people can burn through a 1k page book in a few hours or whatever.