Many people go to book stores, join book clubs, and claim to still read those things. Reading, like cooking, is an activity with degrees of effort and reward. The ability to read is a technical one, but even the most educated readers can move through texts without much food going into their mouths.
Have you read any good books lately? The question is heavy, maybe because books are so full of the world of their author, that one must select carefully who to fill their head-bucket with. Who is this person and what do they stand for? For this reason I’ve always taken this first part animally, against all reason: I choose a book exactly for its cover, how a few of the words on page eight make me feel, and where the book was found or who recommended it; with a total disregard for knowing a lick about the author.
Once the impossible task of choosing a book is completed, I find myself at the total and pure mercy of the author’s insidious worldview. The more confused I am, the better. Because a more demanding encounter with text starts when comprehension falters. Difficulty signals that you’ve reached the edge of what is already understood and are now peering into what Italo Calvino referred to as the “ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.”
Today, it sometimes feels like a clear look of comprehension is valued over this kind of engagement. Speed, coverage, and skimming replace the sort of earnest grasping more common when we’re adolescents before entering the adult world’s pretense for knowing things, that makes books so criminally readable. Words are taken in, decoded, registered, and stored for long enough to be used instrumentally in an upcoming conversation. Good for recounting the news, but nothing has been altered in the reader. The mind yearns to be reorganized, challenged, and expanded.
There are types of text which resist immediate comprehension. The difficulty of reading, which has nothing to do with big words or far-flung references, is not a flaw but a signal. The reader encounters ideas in a strange order which eludes their current understanding and must work to close the gap. The process is slow and frustrating and results in a friction which itself produces growth. Understanding increases not because information is added but because perception is sharpened.
To read a book, then, does not mean to arm oneself for an argument but to be led along, delayed and confused, with humility and a willingness to remain temporarily ignorant.
Pina Lomb
John Hudson White
Cecilia Knapp
Richard Aubern
Rupert Taylor
Alexandra Kleeman
Melissa Mesku
Chloe Caldwell