How to Read a Book Well

A brief essay on the task of reading in the Program at St. John's College.

Published in Colloquy, Fall 2023

I often say I’m not sure I ever read a book before I started the Program. Close reading – attending deeply to what is said, the way it was said, what it could mean – was never a weakness of mine, but something was still missing; some crucial engagement beyond merely what the author has put on offer that gets to the vitality of what we do. How do we facilitate a meaningful conversation with an inanimate object, how do we engage with ideas so renowned they’re practically cliché? If we decide the inexhaustibility we’re seeking in the Great Books actually comes from ourselves, can this teach us how to drink deeper from them? 

I

On a pragmatic concern: I am a strong advocate of writing in our books. The best advice I ever got on annotation – unfortunately, after it was too late to help with my first precept paper – was not to try to make fleshed-out insights or observations in the margins, but rather to simply index them for things I found interesting about it as I read. My margins are full of notes that just describe the action, like “Patroclus’ ghost;” running motifs specific to the text, like “synthetic judgment” or “The Moment;” and big ideas it might speak to, like “fate” or “death” or “divine justice.” 

i 

This makes it easy to find quotes in discussion, and come paper season, it’s so helpful to know what I was thinking about and where. I’ve turned my copy into a bespoke reference for textual evidence on every line of inquiry that matters to me. But more to the point, it helps me read deeper because it helps me return to the text as I think about it later on; it is perhaps only half of the experience to actually read and discuss, the other half is how you turn it over in your mind after. 

ii 

Beyond the practical value, I’d also advocate for an aesthetic value to the practice. Books are strange, fourth dimensional objects – they carry our thoughts forward in time. A thought is ephemeral; a body of them preserved against the passage of time is a text, and that can be as true for the reader as it is for the writer. Further, I am creating a shelf of artifacts of my life at St. John’s. What starts as a two-way conversation between the reader and the author becomes a trialogue, with the version of myself as a Master’s student participating too. Just as I feel privileged to see inside the head of people I care about when I read their annotated books, someone is likely to value these thoughts from this particular stretch of time of my life at some point in the future, even if that someone is only me. 

II

I think what separates a lay reading and a close reading is a decision: to take nothing within a text as incidental. Every word was deliberately chosen for a particular effect; every tangent, every metaphor was considered in light of the whole. I take as axiom that no one writes anything because they want to say something – they do it because they need to say something. Whatever the author set out to express lies in the background of every small detail, so it pays to attend to them with care. How do we attend to details that will enhance the discussion? I think that anything that sticks out to you is interesting. A particular use of language, a mention of something else you read, the way some pet interest of yours appears in a reading: I’ve seen some of the most profitable inquiries come out of someone’s peculiar observation. Someone offering their idiosyncratic take opens up new lines of thought that, definitionally, I could never have hoped to imagine myself. The purpose of our practice is, at least in part, reading to come ready to share. To me, this is what we call the “learning community.” No one else can give your perspective, and it’s our function as classmates in-community to offer it. 

i 

In trying to sort out the big picture, I think it’s valuable to remind myself – as anyone who’s written anything can probably relate to – I’ve never gotten to the end of any writing project and felt like I’d fully said everything I set out to. I try to leave space in the text for what the author perhaps couldn’t write. I think this is different from simply granting a charitable reading; I’m perhaps suggesting we can sometimes glimpse past the text if we look hard enough at the totality as well as the particularity; we can see the forest and the trees. Whether we’re impressed with the picture we see is up to us, but given the choice between two readings, I try to default to the one that is most nuanced, human, interesting. 

ii 

Counterintuitively, what I’m not suggesting is a devotion to the author, nor necessarily their intended message. What I’ve found reading so many Great Texts birthed from Great Minds is that somewhere along the way I stopped reading to find out what Plato, or Descartes, or Dostoevsky thought; I only read to find out what I think. We talk about ourselves as “in conversation” with the books. Part of being a good conversationalist is to hold up your end of the discussion. Have your own thoughts! There’s a bit of a pressure-relief in realizing I can be nearly certain I can’t have a wholly original idea about texts so widely-read, but that doesn’t mean we have to rely on cliché, or pre-made understandings. What does a text mean to you, right now? 

III

In that spirit of that “right now,” I’ll even go so far as to say it is okay to disinterpret a text to the end of creating the most interesting possible reading. “Disinterpretation” implies willfulness; we are free to develop accounts of the reading that run contrary to good sense, so long as we can support it with textual evidence. Put a quote in another context! Take one out of context! Are you unsatisfied with the answer the author provides, can you develop a more elegant account with what else they’ve said? 

i 

Even if you end up spiraling out or spinning the wheels; experimenting by analyzing, combining and recombining ideas from all over the canon, from your classmates, from your favorite novel will be a worthwhile skill to build in its own right. I try not to worry myself with the products of any of these experiments, nor do I try to disguise my experiments in-seminar as completed positions; the idea is to push every idea to its limits. I only ever want to be a better scientist. 

ii 

Partly, my decision to close-read is built on this disinterpretation; I can’t know for sure what was in the mind of the author when they selected any element, but I choose to read it otherwise, even if I’m wrong. If something seems to come out of nowhere based on everything you’ve previously understood about the work, it’s easy enough to disregard it as incidental, but far more worthwhile to examine it as vital, integral. Why might this be here? There’s no ambition to exactitude in “might,” only pliable openness. It is my firm opinion we are not here to be right about anything; we’re here to be wrong in interesting ways.