The Skill of Reading

A friend of mine in student days used to say that it wasn't worth listing 'reading' as a hobby on your CV as 'all it proves is that you can read'.  Someone else I know commented that a degree in English Literature was merely a 'degree in reading'.  I know what they mean, but it's a shame.  Reading can be leisurely, trivial, unchallenging and escapist - and why not?  But it can also be demanding, exhilarating, frustrating, extremely difficult and highly specialised.  Being a 'good' reader is, for my money, a skill well worth having. 

Other Readers

My friend Karen is visiting.  She lectures in Latin American literature.  She is currently reading Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Andrew Miller's Pure.  Her one-word descriptions of these novels are 'cunning', 'creepy' and 'cadaverous' - but not necessarily in that order.

His Dark Materials

This weekend I've been gobbling Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.  I only wish I'd had it to read as a kid - I would have read it over and over as I did Victoria Walker's The Winter of Enchantment and Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Greek Heroes.  I like what Pullman writes in his Acknowledgements at the end of The Amber Spyglass: 'My principle in researching for a novel is "Read like a butterfly, write like a bee"'.

Swing-Seat

Hermione Lee titled her inaugural lecture as Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford 'Reading in Bed'.  In it, she draws a distinction between 'vertical' and 'horizontal' reading.  Vertical reading is 'regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical and productive'.  Horizontal reading is 'unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous, and anarchic'.  You might read vertically in a library, sitting up straight to take notes.  You might read horizontally in bed, along with a cup of tea or gin and tonic.  

We are in the process of buying a house and the lovely current owners have promised that they will leave the swing-seat in the garden.  I am already imagining a kind of reading in it that is both vertical and horizontal, official and unofficial, productive and anarchic.

[Hermione Lee, Reading in Bed: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 21 October 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)]

Re:Reading

Welcome to Re:Reading!

I love reading.  It's my job and my favourite pastime.  This blog is about what I've read, what I'm reading and what I planning to read.  It's about what other people read (including you) and what they say about reading.  It's about why and where and how and what we read.  And, in particular, it's about reading more than once, about reading over and over again, about re-reading.