Post #3: The Art of Reading
“My own reading skills were enhanced in schools, but my pleasure in, my passion for the art of reading came long before. It came in childhood and it began with listening.”
Toni Morrison, 1998 by photographer John Mathew Smith (@JohnMathewSmith)
Skill and Art
“Two approaches seem to me the difference between reading as a skill and reading as an art,” Toni Morrison reflected in an essay called “The Reader as Artist”:
From knowing what STOP means through understanding a scholarly essay or a legal brief, the necessary skill varies greatly, can always be refined, and lets us negotiate life with some measure of control. Reading as art, not Art (once, depressingly called "critical" reading) is another matter. Like the avid devotion to other arts, it develops over time in any number of ways, takes all sorts of routes, and has many origins.
Encouraging words for any reader seeking to become a better reader or to regain a lost passion for reading.
“My own reading skills were enhanced in schools,” Morrison continues, “but my pleasure in, my passion for the art of reading came long before. It came in childhood and it began with listening.”
How fortunate in childhood to have had someone, parent, sibling, guardian, grandparent, aunt or uncle, school teacher, perhaps many of these figures in our lives share stories by reading or telling. It is worth beginning our Village Reads journey by recalling some of those “listening” experiences and knowing that without them, it is highly unlikely the brain could make up for the loss of intuition-rich neural pathways. Reading literally fires up the brain and is one of the best exercises for it! Reading fiction, stories, narrative, “where you are reading from inside another person’s head,” Rita Carter’s informative 2019 TED Talk “Why Reading Matters” explains with new scientific evidence, “is very useful and more important than any other kind of reading.”
Morrison’s essay puts it this way:
Listening required me to surrender to the narrator's world while remaining alert inside it. That Alice-in-Wonderland combination of willing acceptance coupled with intense inquiry is still the way I read literature: slowly, digging for the hidden, questioning or relishing the choices the author made, eager to envision what is there, noticing what is not. In listening and in reading, it is when I surrender to the language, enter it, that I see clearly. Yet only if I remain attentive to its choices can I understand deeply. Sometimes the experience is profound, harrowing, beautiful; other times enraging, contemptible, unrewarding. Whatever the consequence, the practice itself is riveting. I don't need to ‘like’ the work; I want instead to “think” it.
It occurred to me that these words, reconstituted, supply a useful guide for all readers—a series of memorable imperatives worthy of keeping close at hand whenever you and those around you need reminding. Here is a graphic I created for that purpose:
Others have shared Morrison’s belief in the art of reading. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) wrote, “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and our sense of the author is as broad as the world.” In a surprisingly blasphemous move, he urged his audience: “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
(For those readers interested in exploring more on the theme, take a few minutes to read the introductory chapter of another favorite book on reading, University of Virginia Professor Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? I hadn’t read the book in many years, until I thought about it writing this and decided to reread the first chapter. I see we both selected the same passage from Emerson, one that I had memorized after some years teaching his essays to high-school juniors.)
Tools of the Trade
Doubtless, reading, if it is to become a making activity, if it is to transform our souls or become again a passion (as it likely was in childhood), is best accomplished with the help of a few recommended tools of the trade. In the reader’s workshop, the materials’ list is short and costs are relatively low:
a hard (or if necessary an electronic) copy of our shared text, in order to be able to record and easily return to those trumpet blasts.
By the way, “blast” is only one word for what begins essentially as an embodied response—we sometimes forget we are body. You may hear honks or hoots, whispers or whines. No matter, they ought to be given the chance to climb to “the top of the tingling spine,” author Vladimir Nabokov explains, if the reader is to “bask in the magic” of a good story:
“[A] wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass” (final passage of “Good Readers and Good Writers”—see more below; italics mine).
Also, purchase a copy, if you can, in order to add to or start building a library. So much to say here, but allow me to offer a connected and personal value, one that I share with essayist Nassim Taleb. Even if you do not read the book, or any book you are compelled to purchase or are given as a gift, it becomes part of your library and thus an invaluable reminder of what you do not know. (For Maria Condo fans out there, please reconsider her “tidying up” recommendation that includes getting rid of all your books!)
In his prescient book Black Swan, Taleb writes about Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932-2016): “The writer…belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?’ and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
a pen or pencil (if you have borrowed a book, include a few post-it notes—please never mark a book that you do not own). As you read, when the trumpet sounds or the spine tingles, allow yourself to pause for a moment (and it only takes moments) to mark the page (highlighters are not so good for this work, which is why I rarely recommend them—experiment and consider how reading with a highlighter is unlike reading with a pen or pencil, and share your thoughts in the Comments field below).
Jot down notes in the margins, record connections and allusions. Read with memory—with wikipedia and a dictionary (see below) by your side, ideally. If you have a question, write it down. When something has moved you, try to say why? This practice is called annotation, and it is not just for the office or for books assigned in school. Consider Mortimer J. Adler’s declaration at the start of his essay on the subject “How to Mark A Book”: “I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.”
a notebook! The connections to this recommended tool are now likely quite obvious. With your pen or pencil (and let’s follow neuroscience’s lead and write with our pens and not our computers—more on this possibly in a later blog post), start making your own Bible! If you have struggled to keep a journal in your life (knowing it is something good to do), perhaps this reading notebook, a journal of your writing—drawing, scribbling, marking—in response to reading, might be just the fix. It takes all the mystery out of what to write about or where to begin or how to do it! What lands here records your mind thinking with the author’s mind.
Often in these blog posts, I will dive into the text of our book selection and direct attention to a passage that has made me pause and ask questions. Use your notebook to respond to these and ask your own. Consider sharing some of what you are thinking with other readers in the “Comments” field at the end of each blog post—there is one here! Other blog posts might also offer a creative writing prompt related to our reading. Feel free to record that here too, your initial attempts and subsequent revisions. Put pen to the page, and try not to lift that pen for a period of time—you will marvel at what even a small increment of time such as three minutes (set a timer!) pushing that pen can produce—to receive the full benefit of this free writing or think writing. Eliminate the urge to self-edit; do not worry about grammar or correctness.
I have not been successful indexing my notebooks, but the suggestion is to number all pages and to leave a few blank ones at the start of a new notebook for this useful task. Watch as patterns, categories or themes emerge from your efforts. At the very least, I suggest recording a date for each entry!
Welcome to the Reader’s Studio!
Vladimir Nabokov by photographer Carl Mydans (Getty Images)
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”
Like Toni Morrison, the author of Lolita (1955), Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), was also a college professor. In 1941, he taught for a year at Wellesley College and later for nearly a decade at Cornell. Reflecting on the experience of having the then not-yet world famous author as a teacher, a former student from the class of 1948 wrote in her 1977 New Yorker article, “Mister Nabokov had a special reputation as a teacher: there were more than fifty girls attending Russian 201.” The loving profile continues,
He didn't talk about conflict or symbols or character development. He didn't talk about the things that were usually talked about in literature courses. He didn't try to make us state the underlying meaning of something. He didn't make us talk about themes. He never took the joy out of reading... In the gayest, most natural way in the world, he opened the door and led us into the world of Russian literature. He taught us to take literature seriously and what is ordinarily said about it lightly. He gave me back my passion for reading.
One of those lectures became the gem of an essay “Good Readers and Good Writers” that today introduces Nabokov’s posthumously published Lectures on Literature and has been a staple reading assignment for all my students, high-school to adult, full-time to weekend-warrior, for over two decades now. It provided not only a wonderful study in the art of persuasion—rhetoric—but also a wealth of highly instructive, amusing, and motivational lines and images, not to mention another set of useful imperatives beginning with: “Be kind to authors”!
“Kindness to Authors”—something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European masterpieces.
“Good Readers and Good Writers” unites the acts of reading and writing in a way that is for most students novel and revelatory. Somewhere and somehow through the course of an education, they forgot, as Nabokov suggests, to read with their imaginations—“since the master artist used his imagination in creating a book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.” A genius call for empathy.
What else ought the consumer of a book do, according to Nabokov? Remember to read:
with memory,
with a dictionary (such an excellent reminder at every age—I include wikipedia here),
and with “some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance,” the professor and inveterate humorist explains.
Three paragraphs later, at the end of an evocative explanation of the labor of writing—”very futile business if it does not imply fist of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction”—the true nature of the reader-author partnership arrives with this image:
Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.
Student artist and designer, Julian Krušič O’Donnell, offers his interpretation of the memorable passage.
In announcing to his students each semester that his course “among other things,” was “a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures,” Nabokov provides yet another useful image to begin this Village Reads “reading” adventure and our first work, Lee Smith’s Blue Marlin. It is no coincidence that the novella’s thirteen-year-old narrator Jenny, “quick as a rabbit, fast as a bird” as she rides her bike around town, lives to spy (her self-proclaimed “secret career”) and keeps a notebook, inside of which she records “everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction” and announces in an aside, “I would use this stuff later, in my novels.”
Go Slow
As of this writing, I have not read beyond page 23 of this fast-paced 114-page work—it can be read in two or three sittings over a weekend. I have chosen to go slow, in part because Toni Morrison told me to and because Lee Smith tells us in her afterward “The Geographical Cure” that “of all the stories she has written, this one is dearest.” Indeed, each time I pick up these same pages to read again, with my pen and notebook in hand, I uncover new details, which have clarified and deepened my initial insights. I hope this blog inspires you to notice, as Jenny (both the younger and older versions) notices and as Nabokov says we should notice, and to share the results of your own detective work. Taking more of Morrison’s advice, however, be sure to notice what Jenny (and even the author) doesn’t notice. Share any of this too in the Comments field below.
Blue Marlin is a lovely story so far about a couple with some troubles and their young daughter who, much like the author herself, comes of age in a small town in Virginia and imbues these pages with the charming and entertaining voice of an innocent. It is also a fine study of the art (and labor) of reading and writing. Lee Smith gives us so much to talk about in this tiny book with an afterward, so be sure to pick up your copy if you haven’t already and get reading!