I consider reading itself - a state of art. It not only takes a skillful author to produce a great book, but also a skillful reader to comprehend it. “The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Here is some traits, a good reader, in my opinion, should have:
A masterful reader must know how to extract from a book everything valuable it can offer. From different kind of innovative thoughts to simply learning new words.
Reader should adapt his reading method to each book. Someone who doesn’t know how to do that, will quickly run through “Einsteins’ theory” with the same pace he is used to run through his morning news paper.
What do you think? Do you agree? If so, what else would you suggest to someone who wants to improve his reading skills?
Practically all that is currently understood about reading, in the Western tradition, may be found in the near 3000 pages of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. It is organized around 11 distinct schools of thought on the subject. This is just the current state of affairs, which will continue to grow and change without ever arriving at a definitive conclusion.
Some may call it pretentious, but I don’t really understand why. Sure, you can enjoy a book by only looking at the surface details and not thinking about it very hard. You can just let it wash over you and not look for deeper meaning. Some books are written so as to not even have much more to them than those surface level things.
But you can also look deeper, think deeper, contemplate deeper, and feel more deeply about the things that you read, and overall have a deeper experience with a book if you train yourself to see more deeply into it. There are many books that are written with this kind of experience in mind. Why is it pretentious to point this out?
Thank you. What you said very much resonates with exactly how I feel about books. Your comment made me think about a crude analogy to add; let’s assume we have a big barrel filled with water. If you take a stick and start stir the surface area, only the portion of water on top will move. As you gradually lower the stick more water stirs with it. As you reach the bottom the whole barrel will move with a stick. Same with books; the more elements of mental life getting involved in work during reading, the stronger a connection between a text and what we have in our mind and feelings, and the deeper a reading.
The thing that’s pretentious is equating reading to an art form, like writing or music or visual arts, etc. What would your honest reaction be if you met someone and they told you they were an artist. You ask what they do and they tell you that they read. Or that they watch film through a critical lense. At least on my part, I wouldn’t consider them to be artists for that alone.
I would argue that one grows to appreciate good prose the more you read and understand literature.
But to say the reading is itself a form of art, I don’t really agree. Art is about expression, in my opinion, and reading, just like watching a movie or visiting a museum, is more about appreciation and receiving input.
Yeah, no.
/r/iamverysmart/
I suggest you revise thread title to Reading is a task or Reading is a matter of fulfilling obligations or Reading is ideally a matter of adhering to my slightly strange notions.
This reminds me a lot of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. Bloom also offers his views on what makes a good reader. Here are some his suggestions:
“Clear your mind of cant.”
This idea derives from Samuel Johnson and suggests that we should let the work teach us how to read it. Pretty similar to your point! Good readers stop themselves from imposing their own desires or ideologies onto the work. Let the work reveal its artistic vision. Don’t assume there is only one correct style or way to construct a story, poem, or book.
“Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or neighborhood by what or how you read.”
Literature can improve you by expanding your horizons, your imagination of what’s possible, it can teach you what people valued in the past, and offer insights into what makes your neighbor tick, while transporting you to different times and places, but Bloom warns that it won’t change the world for the better in terms of offering some kind of social program. At best, it can only assist indirectly by helping you learn what it means to be human and help you come to know yourself as an individual.
“A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.”
“One must be an inventor to read well.”
Also an idea inspired by Emerson. This seems like it would contradict the first piece of advice to avoid imposing our wills on the text. However, this is about balance. The best literary critics and readers allow the text to dictate the themes and issues, but are still inventive enough to come to new and personal understandings and insights of works of literature.
At the same time, some people read simply for enjoyment rather than deeper insight into the human experience or both or something in between and that is fine too. There are a lot of different motives to read.
If you mean reading is an art in the colloquial sense to mean an acquired skill, as how someone might say “drinking is an art” or “driving a car is an art” then sure.
If you mean reading is an art form in the same sense as writing, painting, or sculpting are forms of art, then no.
I think you’re going the long way around to say things that a lot of us would agree with if you stated them more simply. I also think that you’re making a huge assumption: that the way the author would like you to read the book is how the reader should read it. But authorial intent does not necessarily dictate reader reaction.
Whether you want to read passively or dive in critically and take notes doesn’t depend just on the book, but depends on how you’re reading, why you’re reading, and what your personal goal is.
My biggest problems with your approach:
- So, Charlotte Perkins Gilman probably wouldn’t have written her famous feminist critique “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the form of a horror story if she didn’t want readers to have the option of enjoying it as a horror story. I read it when I was younger because Stephen King said it was the best horror short story ever written. I got the feminist aspect, I thought it just made it more horrifying. But I’ve seen it taught where the horror was ignored completely and instead all we did was look at the parallels with her life, as if it were meant to be solely autobiographical— but is that the way she wanted us to read it, to study it? Or is it ugly and reductive?
You’re assuming that the author has one right way they want you to read and derive things from the text, and that your job is to figure out what that way is and then read it appropriately— but many great writers revel in ambiguity. Is Catcher in the Rye a Buddhist parable or a tale of anomie or a cautionary story about mental illness or part of a larger oeuvre inspired by Salinger’s traumatic war experiences? Good luck! And if you work that our, Henry James is waiting for you.
- Your elitism. You’re being snobby on behalf of writers who did not share any such exclusive attitude. Shakespeare was always scrambling to make a buck, he put the witches in Macbeth to appeal to the new king who had written a book on witchcraft. But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze them. Charles Dickens would not have looked down on the many women who read aloud from his serials in order to entertain their sisters and mothers who were spending all day doing piecework and were bored and wanted entertainment – again, it’s how he made his living. Analyze David Copperfield all you want, but look down on those readers and you miss something important about Dickens. (And the book, for that matter.)
You phrased this beautifully. To me, the way the author wanted to be interpreted is the least interesting reading.
For me any form of communication can be perceived as art, skill and a tool — sometimes all at once.
And as listening is a virtue, same goes for reading — which in itself is a form of hearing authors voice. After some time of listening to it, the connection is already there.
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So, sure, any form of critical — or even more so — deeply invested reading definitely can be described as a form of art.
It probably boils down to some form of a proper appreciation on receivers end, the same formula might be used for singing / music and listening, dancing / figure skating and watching it, and so on…
I don’t see how anything you wrote relates to or argues for reading being an art. It is a skill that has to be developed, trained, and adapted to the situation, but why should it be considered an art and not just a skill?
It just an unnecessary and pretentious assessment to me.
I’ll repeat what I said down in the comments. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art. We could argue endlessly because each one interprets it in his own way.
For me personally art, is something you spend time and hard physical and emotional work to produce. To achieve a great state of art you should master a relevant skill. Reading meets all of this criteria and that’s why I consider it as an art.
art, is something you spend time and hard physical and emotional work to produce
reading a book doesn’t meet this criteria. it does not “produce something”
You absolutely DO produce something. Just not in a regular physical sense. If reading books had no output you wouldn’t read any. The ‘production’ of the books is the gain we receive from reading them, be that a historical knowledge or an emotional happiness.
I don’t see the point in this
OP is going to get slaughtered in the comments.
But it’s a valid point. It’s the whole reason they teach literature in university. People make a profession out of studying literature. This is because there is a richness to the written language that cannot fully be appreciated without knowing the art of its construction.
Anyone can learn to read a piece of text. But there is an art to being able to fully appreciate the nuance and what the writer intended to communicate through how they chose to construct the text.
Poetry may be the clearest example of this as poets will make very specific semantic, lexical, and structural choices that completely change the meaning of a poem if you don’t understand why the poet chose to construct the poem the way they did.
There is an art behind the structure of the written language. Authors will use a certain style of prose to add meaning to their writing. Some authors write in an almost lyrical way, some are more straight forward in their writing. These are all intentional, artistic, choices and absolutely it helps if you have mastered the “art” of reading to be able to appreciate these stylistic choices fully.
It’s the same as appreciating art. Anyone can go to a museum and enjoy art. But I will bet that if you study art and you understand why a painter chose a certain colour palette or lighting for their piece it will change the way you see that piece of art.
You can “master the art of reading.” Just like you can “master the art of conversation.” After all, art is just a skill that someone because extremely well versed in and masters its application.
Roast away. But it’s not an entirely invalid point.
I made a longer post arguing a bit with the OP, but if you don’t mind I’ll say here— you’re joining OP in assuming that authors have a single clear intent in writing the text, and your job is to uncover that and then read obediently along. But a good university literature class, especially in poetry, will hopefully be emphasizing things like the legitimacy of reader reaction, the importance of ambiguity, the impossibility of divining authorial intent etc. The text has no life apart from the intent of the author? Derrida and Bakhtin want a word!
It’s a bit reductive…
I strongly disagree. How on earth can a single person “extract from a book everything valuable it can offer” when some works of literature have been studied by scholars for hundreds of years and yet people still manage to come up with new ways of interpreting them?
Also, everyone has different goals in mind for when they read, ands sometimes these goals shift depending on the context. There’s no reason to consider one type of reading more of an “art” than any other.