Ways Of Reading

An awful lot is said about reading in schools, but not nearly enough about ways of doing it. Put simply, there are many different ways of reading a book and the one you choose - and there needs to be a conscious choice, at least as far as the mature reader is concerned - is heavily dependent upon the nature of what is being read. And, of course, there's a lot more than books to be read.

This thought sprung to mind when I was considering the books I've recently finished reading, and the two, no, make that three, on-going tomes. Each has involved a very different kind of reading:

I dashed through the first volume of Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing at breakneck speed deliberately not thinking too hard, if at all, just stopping at the end of each episode as delineated in the original comics to ask myself whether to stop just to spin the giddy experience out a little longer. I rarely did - stop, that is.

I much more consciously spun out Val McDermid's The Distant Echo, partly because it was too long to take at one go, and partly because my attention began to flag a little regarding detail in the second half and I was in danger of not really reading closely enough since I really wanted to know how it would all work out. I'm proud to say I've never been one of those who turn to the last page to find out who the killer is. But I do know why people do so. Also I was reading the novel during the Drama Camp and it was a nice place to escape to occasionally over the long days - enjoyable as they were.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies I read slowly, sometimes repeating paragraphs. There was an element of savouring going on here, but also the stories rarely involved genuinely compelling narratives, so there wasn't much to rush for.

I didn't actually mean to read Erica Wagner's Ariel's Gift at all at this point in time. I just glanced at the first chapter, essentially to get a sense of where Ms Wagner stands on the whole Sylvia vs Ted thing (sensibly, nowhere at all really), then had a look at her comments on a favourite poem from near the end of Birthday Letters which features in her final chapter, and then decided I might as well take in the whole thing. I did so on a chapter by chapter basis, not reading all that closely unless something very much caught my attention, usually involving material of which previously I'd had no awareness at all, for the most part just evoking for myself the terrible trajectory of the sad story. I knew perfectly well I would read the whole thing again soon, with copies of Birthday Letters and Plath's Collected open at the corresponding poems, so I wasn't in any sense concerned with a thorough reading. I also found myself thinking hard and thinking sadly of some of the issues involved and the damage done. In truth, I got a little depressed.

And then there's my on-going encounter with Hopkins: just about the slowest kind of reading possible, except for my Shakespeare Sonnets project which, involving as it does moving around three sets of pages at any one time - from a sonnet, to Kerrigan's notes, to Paterson's commentary - moves at a wonderfully glacial pace. I reckon I read each individual poem at least six times before moving on.