On How to Read

My tenth grade Honors English teacher, Mr. Hill, rode a motorcycle and had silvered, shoulder length hair. When speaking, he would end a sentence by running his hand through his hair, giving it volume and a flip. He believed that we create our own meaning when we read. That the author lays something out before us and we develop a sense of what they mean. The author’s intent was secondary. The competing thought is more that the author’s intent is something we have to realize not create ourselves. 

Ovid’s Metamorphoses was our Honor’s Summer Project.  I remember agonizing over it. Incredibly late nights and incredibly early mornings yielded a book doubled in size by the time I had finished it. The grime, oil, dirt, highlighter, and sticky notes plagued the pages as if infected by an over-zealous 15 year old (because it was). You could barely read it after I had finished annotating it. It was a hack job and for what? 

I keep a new copy on my shelves–the original version given to a teacher I bonded with. Unreadable, illegible, and torn to pieces, that original copy represents a curve in knowledge that I believe I am still trying to learn, 8 years later. 

The problem with how this project was handled when I was 15 is that I read Metamorphoses with no context. I was reading this book to do a project. It was thrown to wolves and subsequently torn to shreds. Color-coded highlights, thought paragraphs in the margins, spilled food crusting the pages together: this is what I did to one of the best pieces of literature of all time. 

This is not to say that this is not correct. Years later, I would go on to take two classes on Shakespeare (Jacobian and Elizabethan era). I would read 10 plays, in total and write a collective 30 pages on King Lear and Titus Andronicus. My paper on King Lear was a feat–one of the best essays I have written, to date. Ultimately deemed “very clever,” I could only have done this with some serious backend work. 

The backend work included reading period pieces on Shakespeare, learning enough Early Modern English to make my way through plays, and watching a lot, I mean a lot, of plays while I read them. It was understanding culturally significant phrases and places such as Bedlam. Reading the actual play probably took a fifth of the time. The rest was sifting through hundreds of pages from critics and academics.  

Additional backend work included reading a shit ton. Like hundreds of books over the course of my life. Reading is a skill and your brain is a muscle. It does not get easier without any work. Working out this muscle tones it and eventually makes it bigger (or deepens the incredibly strange wrinkles on the brain’s surface). The point is, I ripped into these plays similar to how I tore into Ovid. But I had a point. And the text was still legible after I was done. 

I did not have any of this information or skill when I first read Ovid. There is a unique innocence that is required to move through literature with confidence and at that point I certainly had it. This innocence is not a bad thing. Innocence is zeal and excitement. Something that motivates. The issue with it is it can leave you with “why do I not understand this?” The innocence frustrates purpose just as much as it drives purpose. You begin to realize that an incredible amount of work is needed. 

Mr. Hill gave me some of the best advice I have ever received: you’re reading too slow! I read Ovid too slow. I read Kafka too slow. I read so much too slow that I missed the point. I agonized over every. single. word. And I missed the point. 

This is not to say that we should race through books. It is to say that reading is the art of locating and identifying the author’s pattern and pacing and riding it out. It does not matter what camp you fall in to: we discover meaning versus we identify meaning. Rather, what matters is recognizing authorial intent and developing a response to her pattern. Where did she take breaks? What kind of tone is she using? Where did she stop to think about what would happen next? 

Grammar and spacing is a good indictor of pattern and pacing, but true understanding can be found when you are akin to a ball of yarn rolling down a hill, unweaving with every revolution. You realize you have no control. You realize that you’ve met the author’s pacing. 

Here are my tips from a source that I find reliably unreliable, take it as you will: 

1) Take notes however you want, but do not stop reading. Note taking should not be a complete re-direction. It should be a flag of sorts.

2) Actually come back to notes. Notes don’t work unless you do. 

3) Read the same author. Learning how to identify patterns and pacing may come more naturally after reading the same author a few times. 

4) Just keep reading.

5) Never tell yourself that you don’t understand. The author’s inability to communicate a clear point is not your responsibility to rectify. 

6) In light of #5, actually do your research, though. If you’re walking into literature with absolutely no baseline or backstory, cultural, political, or social, you are making it harder on yourself. Do some heavy lifting at the beginning and reap the rewards later. 

7) Read it again. This is hypocritical as I have never read a book cover to cover a second time. I have, however, gone over my notes, read scenes, chapters, paragraphs, several times over that have more than likely amounted to a full re-read. Take this how you want. 

Literature is not meant to be thrown to the wolves. Put it on your tongue and swirl it around like good wine. Feel its flavor and identify its notes. Do not consume just to consume, there is shittier wine to get drunk with.