I consider reading itself - a state of art. It not only takes a skillful author to produce a great book, but also a skillful reader to comprehend it. “The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Here is some traits, a good reader, in my opinion, should have:
A masterful reader must know how to extract from a book everything valuable it can offer. From different kind of innovative thoughts to simply learning new words.
Reader should adapt his reading method to each book. Someone who doesn’t know how to do that, will quickly run through “Einsteins’ theory” with the same pace he is used to run through his morning news paper.
What do you think? Do you agree? If so, what else would you suggest to someone who wants to improve his reading skills?
Some may call it pretentious, but I don’t really understand why. Sure, you can enjoy a book by only looking at the surface details and not thinking about it very hard. You can just let it wash over you and not look for deeper meaning. Some books are written so as to not even have much more to them than those surface level things.
But you can also look deeper, think deeper, contemplate deeper, and feel more deeply about the things that you read, and overall have a deeper experience with a book if you train yourself to see more deeply into it. There are many books that are written with this kind of experience in mind. Why is it pretentious to point this out?
Thank you. What you said very much resonates with exactly how I feel about books. Your comment made me think about a crude analogy to add; let’s assume we have a big barrel filled with water. If you take a stick and start stir the surface area, only the portion of water on top will move. As you gradually lower the stick more water stirs with it. As you reach the bottom the whole barrel will move with a stick. Same with books; the more elements of mental life getting involved in work during reading, the stronger a connection between a text and what we have in our mind and feelings, and the deeper a reading.
The thing that’s pretentious is equating reading to an art form, like writing or music or visual arts, etc. What would your honest reaction be if you met someone and they told you they were an artist. You ask what they do and they tell you that they read. Or that they watch film through a critical lense. At least on my part, I wouldn’t consider them to be artists for that alone.