The Art of Reading

            Have you ever noticed that airports seem to be magnets for what’s latest in the world of Radio Shack gadgetry? Ten years ago cell phones were rare; now they’re stuck in people’s ears. There’s a computer in every other lap, a PDA in every third palm and where there’s not a hand held computer game it’s as likely to be because someone’s playing the game on his phone instead. But you also still see books everywhere, even among the electronically enhanced. Harry Potter sticking out of a purse, The Purpose Driven Life stuffed in the external pocket of a suitcase on wheels. Air travel is a refuge for book reading, that pass-time of past centuries that will likely endure for centuries to come. And this is the great paradox of reading in the age of technology: books are high priority, even in the technology-of-the-now world of airports, and yet technology makes it harder for us to read.

            In two previous columns, we looked at why books matter, why they’re worth our time and effort. The bottom line, though, is that electronic media are often easier for us to understand. This month I want to offer a few simple strategies to combat the difficulty people have with reading books.

            Let me admit right up front that some books are just too “fluffy,” to be worth all of the suggestions that follow here. So apply them where needed.¹

            1. Preview a book before you start reading. Read the blurb on the dust jacket or back cover. Read the contents page if there is one, and, never skip forewords or introductions.

            2. Use a pen when you read. Any book with lots of characters will always be hard to follow. I mark them in the book and/or make a running list if there are too many to keep straight in my head.

            3. Never be afraid to stop reading so you think about the plot or some deep idea you’ve just encountered. Even be willing to backtrack and re-read bits if you’re lost or if there’s a plot twist you want to understand better.

            4. If you run across an unusual or lengthy description of an object or place, pay attention to it and mark it; it may be symbolic. This is also true for anything that repeatedly appears in the book: spiral staircases, numbers, colors, a kind of flower or bird. They may mean something on a deeper level.

            5. Understand the plot. If you make mistakes about the story’s action you may get lost or completely miss the meaning. Mark key plot moments when you see them.

            6. Sometimes you think to yourself, “I just don’t get it.” That’s not necessarily your fault. Sometimes books don’t want you to make sense of them till the ending. Readers often demand too quickly to understand what they’re reading and don’t have the patience to live with questions. But you don’t watch ten minutes of a movie and then quit because you can’t understand it, right? You keep watching till the answers reveal themselves. Don’t try so hard to “conquer” the book. Let it soak in instead.

            7. Look for all those things your English teachers taught you to look for: symbols, the climax, the setting, metaphors, and the structure or organization of the story. Also pay attention to the characters. What kind of people are they? Why do they do what they do? Are they symbolic? Do they change through the story?

            8. This is the hard one because we’re (I’m) usually too lazy to do it: look up the words you don’t know! Keep a dictionary beside you (or use an on-line dictionary through your computer) to find definitions and write them in the margins.

            9. Talk back to the book by writing notes in the margins: predict what’s going to happen later, ask questions, write a note about a story you’re reminded of from another book or movie. I like to write page numbers down in the margins: when I see something that connects back to something I’ve read before, like a repeated phrase, I’ll go back and find that section and write the matching page numbers in both places in the book (for example, on page nine I’ll write, “see p. 23” and on page 23 I’ll write “see p. 9”).

            10. If you run across an amazing quote, something so well said that you want to be able to find it again without flipping through every page of the book, take a post-it note, write a brief word or phrase on the non-sticky side of the note summarizing what the quote in the book is about, and put the post-it note on that page with the non-sticky side sticking out of the top or side of the book so you can see it when the book is closed. You’ll never have to ask, “Now where did I read that great quote?” again.

            11. Finally, after you’ve read the book, look through it again to see what you might learn in retrospect from the notes you made.

            I am confident that books are not going anywhere. But, unless we practice, we may read them less and therefore lose so much of what they have to offer. Practice makes perfect. The more books we read the better we’ll become, and the better at reading we become the more books we’ll read. It’s a win-win situation.

¹ A reminder: In this series on the importance of books I’ve been focusing on fiction. Some of the tips that follow work for non-fiction as well, but most of them focus on reading stories. (back to reference)