Adler Rex of Reading

This is some nice stuff Matt sent me. Enjoy!

A Few Tips on How to Read Imaginative Literature
- from Chapters 14 and 15 of Mortimer J. Adler's and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book

1) Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

While the goal of expository works is to communicate knowledge, the goal of imaginative literature is to communicate experience. Van Doren writes, "We learn from experience - the experiences that we have in the course of our daily lives. So, too, we can learn from the vicarious, or artistically created, experiences that fiction produces in our imagination." In order to gain from a work of imaginative literature, one must feel at home in the world created by the writer.

2) "Ideally, a story should be read at one sitting,"

Van Doren writes. If this is not feasible, "the ideal should be approximated by compressing the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible. Otherwise you will forget what happened, the unity of the plot will escape you, and you will be lost . . . Read quickly, we suggest, and with total immersion."

3) Read out loud.

I can tell you from personal experience that this can be quite fun, especially with books in the style of Oedipus. Imagine the actors on stage and read it (in thought, if not in voice) as you imagine they would do it. Trust me, it helps.

4) A word about the Chorus:

(I'll just quote the whole paragraph): "One thing we do know about the staging of Greek plays is that the tragic actors wore buskins on their feet that elevated them several inches above the ground. (They also wore masks.) But the members of the chorus did not wear buskins, though they sometimes wore masks. The comparison between the size of the tragic protagonists, on the one hand, and the members of the chorus, on the other hand, was thus highly significant. Therefore, you should always imagine, when you read the words of the chorus, that the words are spoken by persons of your own stature; while the words spoken by the protagonists proceed from the mouths of giants, from personages who did not only seem, but actually were, larger than life."