[slow reads logo]

family

    at betty's

    chaise

    the comforter

    fear the turtle

    granny

    hymn 236

    unless and until

    william at forty

friends

    curling (lekshe)

    footnotes (dale)

    hotel (patry)

    leturn (shai)

    morning drive (tom)

    st. luke's (steve)

    thank you (sage)

nash

    improvements

    they move

peter

    amazon, amazon!

    foretopmen

    hardball

    my kite

    pines

    the story of my birth

    wings, boats, asses

index

rss feed

Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com 

 
the art of reading

[reading arts column]by Dave Bonta

Reading something for the second time is so much more satisfying than that first read-through. So many books withhold their full treasures from the first-time reader. Not that the first time can't be special too, of course: surfaces are beautiful, and not to be taken lightly. During that first, heady encounter with a text, it is not merely the words that entrance us. The typefont, the design, the texture of the paper, the look and feel of covers and slipcovers, even the smell of the bindings - if new - or the patina that comes with good use: these too are manifest occasions for pleasure and surprise.

But few of us possess the skill as readers to avoid succumbing to that first-time excitement and finishing the book too soon. And to lay it aside at that point, never to return, would constitute not simply callousness but profound disrespect. Unless the book at hand be some cheap, manupulative thing, in which case even a single reading amounts to little more than "an expense of spirit in a waste of shame," as Shakespeare once said about something else entirely.

As a reader, I must always aspire to do better next time and never become satisfied with my current techniques. If I know that my first time through a book tends to be a bit on the shallow side, I may change strategies and begin by lightly skimming through what look like the best spots, or re-visiting it at unexpected times and places, dipping into it just enough to whet my appetite for the first, prolonged session. But by then the first reading is really the second, or the third - it doesn't matter. I'm no longer keeping score.

The kinds of books I enjoy most don't necessarily need to be sampled in a set order, and sometimes I like to start with the last poem or chapter and work my way slowly toward the front. Or sometimes it's fun to start in the middle and work toward both ends, alternating between the front half and the back. Hence, I suppose, my disdain for tightly plotted novels that insist on rigid conformity with standard procedure. Plus, given my addictive personality, I hate to get sucked into a book like that because I know I won't be able to sleep, eat or do much of anything else until it's done. Ten or twenty hours later I'll emerge from the novel as if from a parallel universe, shaking with adrenaline and ready to drop from exhaustion at the same time. After an experience like that, it will take me several days to undo the spell and fully return to my own, familiar weltanschauung.

There was a time in my youth when I thought that kind of full-throttle excitement was indispensable to the enjoyment of a book. But as I near the threshold of maturity I find myself craving a calmer and - I would argue - deeper form of immersion. This doesn't rule out novels altogether, but it does definitely favor the second reading over the too-hasty first one. The plot once exposed for the artful contrivance that it is, one is free to take one's time and relish the writing for its own sake. All goals have been abandoned aside from the most general: to advance in pleasure through insight - or is it vice versa? Unless one has some ghoulish analytic project to complete, some heartless application of the whips and restraints of academic theory, one can dwell within the garden of the text almost indefinitely for the colors and the scent alone. The mind explores gently and almost by instinct now, enfolded in a matrix where word, image and meaning are coterminous and virtually indistinguishable. The senses return to an almost Edenic innocence. Freed of judgements and distances, the patient reader at last attains a kind of high plateau, every pore fully open and flooded with the clearest, coolest light.

*

What the writer finally wants to save,
laboring into the white afternoon
at her kitchen table,
adrift in drafts,
ringed in scraps for
the compost, is just this savoring
of time's luxuriant spread.

 

[Enjoy more of Dave's posts at Via Negativa.]

© 2005 Dave Bonta. Used by permission.

 
passages

[photo]

[photo]

short & slow

     


blogroll

Autobiology
Blaugustine
Box Elder
The Cassandra Pages
Clumps and Voids
Crack Skull Bob
Creature of the Shade
Couch Trip
Daintee
Dialogues with Silence
Dick Jones's Patteran Pages
Durable Pigments
Eudaemonia
Every Day and Every Night

Everything Feeds Process

Feathers of Hope
Fifty-Two: Weekly Poems
Finding Time for God
Fragments from Floyd
Fr. Scott & Co. Ask Some New Qs
Heraclitean Fire

Hoarded Ordinaries
Idiot Dreams
In a Dark Time
Irishmutt
Iron Monkey
Ivy Is Here
Johnmiedema.ca
Listening After Dark
Marcia Bonta
The Middlewesterner
Mole
My Gorgeous Somewhere
Not Native Fruit
On the Slow Train
Paula's House of Toast
(p) (b)
Qarrtsiluni
The Rain in My Purse
Sage Said So
Scenes from a Slow-Moving Train
Shadow Cabinet
Shadows and Symbols
Simply Wait
Spoil
Spring in the Road
Stony Moss
Tasting Rhubarb
3rd House Journal
Tumblewords
Two Dishes but to One Table
Velveteen Rabbi
Verbal Privilege
Via Negativa
Walking with Celebi
WMC Is Now Here