Preface How to Read This Book

At its most basic, this is a book about how to read difficult texts, and I am addressing it like a letter to my students. As I write in the introduction, it picks up where an earlier book left off; that book, too, I addressed like a letter to my students.1 In both cases, I have drawn inspiration from the poet Roque Dalton, who wrote, “I believe the world is beautiful / and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”2 I agree about poetry (it pervades this book), but I’ll go further. The joy of discovering new worlds through difficult texts (in other words, the joy of reading), like bread, is for everyone.

This strategy has influenced my choices related to style and, by way of style, my mode of argumentation. I am following a precept set forth by Paul Ricoeur, who emerges as the hero of this book, if academic books can be said to have heroes. Ricoeur explained in a 1988 interview that writers face a choice between “writing for the general public” and “writing for the greatest specialist in one’s discipline, the one you have to convince.”3 He also said, “we must describe the complex object, but intervene where we are.”4 I am writing for my students, who are much closer to the general public than disciplinary specialists. My greatest potential impact is there: the object is complex, but it is in a pedagogical space that I am intervening.

However, although this book has pedagogical goals, it is not a textbook. I am seeking to make an original contribution to a long-standing debate in the humanities about the tools we use to investigate the world, tools I would call method except that the term evokes a narrow category that I am trying to expand. This book finds its predecessors in a genre we might call “how to read” books (or “how to read books”) that has flourished since the early twentieth century. These books include Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (published in 1940, with an updated edition co-authored by Charles van Dooren in 1972) and Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why (published in 2000).5 They are frequently marked by what Karen Manarin describes as the “‘reading crisis’ trope,”6 recognizable in the nostalgia for the putative lost art of reading, a reverence or veneration for an unjustly neglected canon, and a resistance to considerations (such as “‘gender and sexuality’ and ‘multiculturalism’”)7 that some see as intrusive and exogenous to the field of literary studies. Not all examples of the genre employ this trope: Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “How Should One Read a Book?” sees value in great writing but does not rehearse the narrative of decline, while, more recently, the contributors to Kaitlin Heller and Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s How We Read provide a playful, open-ended engagement with the act of reading.8 The question of how to read has even produced insightful Twitter threads.9

I share these writers’ admiration of the classics, but not (in the case of Adler, van Dooren, and Bloom) their dismissal of the popular. I do not agree that “we can only learn from our ‘betters,’”10 perhaps because I am unsure who these “betters” are: Sappho and Homer can instruct us, but so can Star Trek: Voyager. Still, Adler has a passage in the 1940 edition of his book that is worth citing at length because he and I are, so to speak, on the very same page:

There is only one situation that I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences.11

We should read, I argue, like we are in love.

My interest lies in discovering what the interpretation of metaphor, the figure of speech that links two dissimilar things, reveals about reading. I also consider texts, meaningful actions, and in the end, other people, all of which are like metaphors but on ever larger scales. In this respect, metaphor plays a paradoxical role: it is an object I examine but, through the comparisons I constantly make with it, it is also a tool I use to examine other objects. Metaphor, in its structure and logic, becomes a metaphor for texts, actions, and people.

Here is where the effects of my strategy of addressing this book to my students become clear. As I argue, a metaphor’s meaning emerges in the space between its literal and figurative meanings. It is dynamic, rather than something we can pin down once and for all. I have sought therefore to leave that space open, which, more concretely, has meant employing a mode of argumentation that relies as much on induction as it does on deduction. I have also included a wide range of images for this reason. Although some are diagrams I created to represent my argument visually, others I have repurposed from public domain sources, largely OldBookIllustrations.com, an archive of lovely pictures scanned from books published in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.12 To interpret these images, I ask the reader to find the link between them and the text, which is more abstract in some places than others. To explore the link between dissimilar objects—words and pictures—is to explore the space opened by metaphor. That process becomes another way to make sense of my argument.

That approach is the reading strategy I want to encourage. This book is about how texts, especially difficult ones, open a world. The point is not so much to comprehend these worlds as it is to discover and explore them.