Bird of The Thinklings asks a couple reading questions. “When you read a book, do you EVER skip any pages or whole sections? If you do skip pages/sections, and you get to the end of the book, do you count the book as “read”?”
Commenter Sara raises a good point in her response.
What if you plow through every word of a book (as I did with Moby Dick at age 16) but miss half the point of what’s going on. Have you read it? After I finished Moby, I told my delighted uncle about it–it’s his favorite book ever. (Seriously, his copy is held together with duct tape and has a hand drawn whale on the cover / top page.) Anyway, he gave me copies of some of his favorite literary theorists on the thing, who made a very convincing argument that Melville was doing something very specifically literary with those whale sex organ chapters, and others of that sort. I not only hadn’t caught it when I read the book–I didn’t even have the concept that such a thing could be going on. Reminds me of one of my favorite authors talking about picking up her father’s copy of Animal Farm when she was ten because she liked animal stories and there was a horse on the cover . . .
Reposting comments from her blog….
I skim a bit…it depends on the book, and the reading experience I want to have.
When considering Lewis, though, another quote comes to mind: “There may be hope for the man who has not read Milton, but there is no hope (literarily speaking) for the man who has read Milton once, and thinks that settles the issue.”
(I’m not sure that he used Milton for the example, as I’m recalling from memory.)
The point is, fiction isn’t made to be read so much as enjoyed. Those who have seen the Lord of the Rings films have (I hope) gotten something really beautiful and profound from Tolkien. Those who have skimmed through the books have gotten a whole lot more. Those who have read the books 20 times and read the Silmarillion and the Book of Lost Tales I and II have gotten even more, but still may find something new on their 21st reading.
I guess the point is, if you’ve picked up a story, and you’ve got something worthwhile out of it, does it really matter rather you’ve “read” it or not?
Good answer! Thanks for commenting.
One /needs/ to skip with Sir Walter Scott. I always advise beginners to take, say, The Bride of Lammermoor or The Heart of Midlothian and go right to Chapter 2.
I never skip pages, and I never read the ending before I’ve read the whole book. I have however, been 3/4 of the way through a book and said, “This is dreck,” and pitched it. I read within the last chapter of “A Confederacy of Dunces” just stopped. I couldn’t go on.
“I always advise beginners to take, say, The Bride of Lammermoor or The Heart of Midlothian and go right to Chapter 2.”
Or you could advise them to take Redgauntlet and start at chapter 1.
The quality of reading necessarily varies with the material at hand and the reader’s purpose. I have read the first two James Bond books, Casino Royale and Live and Let Die, and found a considerable difference in quality between them. Casino Royale is very good but I skipped the sweating and groaning (the preoccupation with sex in the Bond stories being not evidently an invention of Hollywood).
Deborah, I agree with you on A Confederacy of Dunces. Cannot comprehend the high opinion so many people have of it. Maybe I’m just missing something.
Some people think we should skip the whole book, or at least feel no compunction for discussing books we have not read. Says Professor of French Literature Pierre Bayard: “in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.” http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2647599,00.html
When I think of the Bond novels, all that comes to mind is the sentence Jacques Barzun quotes in Simple & Direct–something to the effect that “Bond’s knee was his Achilles heel”–Ach!