“I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I imagined. I read books which gave me courage and helped me to see, and I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.” – Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart (2017).
“I have woven you this wide shroud out of humble words/ I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always/ I will never forget one single thing.” – Anna Akhmatova, Requiem.
Here in Canada, people are encouraged to read books; for a citizenry that is well-read can sustain the well-being of the country. To name a few: we have the Canada Reads sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) that takes place on March 27-30; the Canada Book Day which is celebrated annually on April 23; and the Word on the Street every September. As a book lover, my reading verges on being problematic sometimes. I always find myself questioning if I comprehend correctly what the author wants to convey, especially if the book contains allusions, metaphors and ironies. Comprehension and interpretation make my reading experience not an easy stroll in the park. For that reason, I bought several books to help me improve my reading skill. Let’s go through some of them.
First is the classic work of Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren, How to Read A Book (1940). The book recommends four levels of reading: (1) Elementary Reading, (2) Inspectional Reading, (3) Analytical Reading, and (4) Syntopical Reading. The elementary reading is what a child does. It is the initial process a child undergoes to learn how to read. It asks the question: What does a word or a sentence mean? In inspectional reading, time is of the essence. The reader wants to know immediately if a book warrants more time or not. This is where skimming is important. At this level, what is asked is: What is the book all about? The simplest ways to find the answer are: (1) read the dust jacket, the publisher’s burb, the preface, and the introduction; (2) study the table of contents; (3) check the index; and (4) read a paragraph or two in sequence for several pages. The analytical reading demands more time & effort from the reader. Because the aim is thorough understanding of the argument laid out by the author, the reader must finish the book in its entirety. It is necessary that the reader must make notes & ask many questions. The syntopical reading is for the more sophisticated reader because it demands that many books are read on the subject for comparative purposes. It is the most active and more effort kind of reading.
If I am to enrich my reading experience by being a critical, active reader, it would be a tremendous challenge indeed. It would be like climbing Mt. Everest – the experience could be exhausting, painful & likely to fail. Nevertheless, I have to make a decision how my time can be better used up at this stage of my life. There is always the easy way out: just read for information or entertainment. But if I do this, then most of my book collection would be donated right away. That is something I can’t forgive myself.
Second is John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel (2006). At the outset, Sutherland delves on the problem of too many books in the market: “the national book supply has swollen from trickle to deluge, with the prospect of a veritable tsunami to come.” That’s precisely how I look at my book collection. And to make the problem manageable is to do “ruthless short cuts.” The first step before buying the book, Sutherland recommends, is to know your taste. Once you’ve established that, then when you go to the bookstore, the book recommends you to do an intelligent browsing. This is achieved by: (1) reading the blurbs in the dustjackets of books; (2) determining if the title of the book refers to the argument of the book; reading the prefaces, epigraphs, forewords, and afterwords; ensuring the name of the author is not a pseudonym; sniffing at the first lines for universal claim of truism; relying cautiously on book reviews; looking at the bestseller and literary award lists; and applying the Marshall McLuhan test of turning to page 69 of any book and reading it (if you like what it says on that page, then buy the book). I am done, though, with book buying. When I clear up my book collection, I will resort to borrowing books from the library (I am not much to following a plan because I borrow more books now than reading the books I have.)
What I have next is a thick book of 591 pages. It is by Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. According to the book’s jacket, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) “is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one.” Smiley embarked on a reading expedition of a hundred novels and evaluated each one of them but not before giving the reader her insight of what a novel is. She defines novel as “lengthy, written, prose, narrative, and protagonist. All additional characteristics – characters, plot, themes, setting, style, point of view, tone, historical accuracy, philosophical profundity, revolutionary or revelatory effect, pleasure, enlightenment, transcendence, and truth – grow out of the ironclad relationships among these five elements.” She used up to 280 pages to give her readers her deep insights of what a novel is. As a writer, her perspectives in understanding the long arguments of the novel are quite a gem. “The novel,” she writes, “is a particular type of hypothesis – it is an ontological construct, it is a theory of being. A novel proposes that the world has a certain mode of existing. It doesn’t propose this by asserting explicitly, but by depicting it implicitly.” A better understanding of this construct, Smiley introduces the arrangement of the novel as a clock of twelve categories or stations: travel, history, biography, tale, joke, gossip, diary/letter, confession, polemic, essay, epic, and romance. She claims that “some novels use many of them, others use only a few, but it is impossible to have a novel that uses none of them. If we take some novels and plot them around the clock, we can get insight both into how these novels work and why some of them seem ‘great’”. But in order to nail this approach, the reader must be reading a lot. As Smiley advises, “reading many novels, which all inevitably contrast with one another and have different ways of appealing to a reader, will teach her not only what she likes but also what there is to like, and why.” In the end, the reader must make time and enjoy the so many pleasures that novels offer. Smiley lists them as: “the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of acknowledged sin and attempted redemption, the polemical pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one’s nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance.”
In contrast, I have this slim book written by Ms. Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers (2000), all 180 pages including the Index, in which she simply advised that “in order to form your own literary taste and put it under your conscious control, always account for what you do or do not like in your reading – and always give yourself reasons.” Of course, for reader to state the reason for liking or disliking a book, one must be familiar with the elements of a story. For Ms. Rand, the most important elements of a story were plot, theme, characterization, and style. Shen then proceeded to explain the essential techniques for writing. By making the time to read the book and be familiar with the nuts and bolts of writing, the reader will now have the tool for evaluating whether a book is good or bad. In one sentence, Ms. Rand, described it as “in judging a novel’s esthetic value, all that one has to know is the author’s theme and how well he has carried it out.”
If you were aiming to become a student of literature, or have a career as a literary critic, this book by X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Fiction, 5th edition (1991), would be a good start. It was structured as an introductory textbook with its clear explanation of the elements of a story, followed by selected stories to drive home his topics, then with some questions about the cited stories, and ended the chapter with suggestions for writing. There were excellent short stories included in the book like A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway which is a story about the aloneness of the old and the indifference of the young, written well with simple words and short sentences, yet it made its argument for deeper reflection.
Much thicker book but organized the same way as Kennedy’s An Introduction to Fiction is The McGraw Hill Introduction to Literature (1985) by Gilbert H. Muller and John A. Williams. It is also meant to be a reference book for students of literature. However, it focuses only on short story for the fiction form, poetry and drama. It is 1,068 pages long. I read the Introduction and few pages of Chapter 1. From the Introduction, I found these two statements to be worth remembering in my approach to evaluating those stories I am well engaged. First: “Nevertheless, if reading a work of fiction makes us believe in its content and its characters, then the work should be considered successful: for fiction is intended first to find believers, and belief must precede any other reaction to the work.” And second: “By whatever means a story is created and however it is structured, whether it imitates life, expresses it, affects it, or projects it, language ultimately makes the story work.”
I’ll end this discussion about reading with one last quote from the award-winning novelist, Hilary Mantel. She said: “There’s always going to be something slightly beyond your comprehension, but you must go reaching it. If you thought the record was the whole story, the dream is teaching you how fragile the record is.”
20 April 2023