Quinn Cook

can you tell i’ve been thinking a lot about reading lately? going from my dorm room, which had less than a dozen books at a time, to back home, which has significantly more, hasn’t helped. and no, i won’t get less pretentious about it. at any rate:

i was reading The Lathe of Heaven, and i was enjoying it quite a bit, letting the scenes play out in my head like a movie, when a particularly well-written sentence made me pause.

Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slip-streams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.

so, of course, i took a photo of the passage. i used to have a physical commonplace book, where i would transcribe quotes/facts/thoughts by hand, but i’ve gotten lazy and now only take photos that languish away, forgotten in my camera reel.

looking back on my physical notebooks, though, i realized i used to be a much different reader (at least when it came to fiction). for a time, i was a very conscientious reader, taking notes and disecting sentences and thinking about themes, motifs, and all that literary nonsense. i read with a writer’s eye, or an analytic tilt, or to apreciate the mastery of the prose, or while actively engaged, or however you want to describe it.

nowadays, i still do that, but only when i’m jolted out of my comfortable reading. with nonfiction, i of course still take notes and annotate and such, but with fiction my brain glazes over: i read for reading’s sake, for enjoyment, or pleasure, or to get lost in the world so expertly woven, or however you want to describe it.

it’s only when i read something so crystal clear, a sentence so sharp and incisive and well-formed that it’s a shock to my system that i revert back into conscious reading. then, i think to myself, “wow. what a beautifully crafted sentence. i could never come up with something like this myself—but now i’m going to steal it.” then i go straight back into easy reading.

unfortunately, my two kinds of reading are anathema to one another. if i’m reading easily, i will gloss over and likely miss many of the subtler details and larger points. (don’t ask me, for example, about the literary themes of Madame Bovary. i don’t even remember how it ended.) when i’m reading consciously, i still do enjoy it, but, in exchange for a better appreciation of the writing itself, i lose immersion into the world before me, and i’m constantly reminded of being outside the book. i only get, it seems, one at a time.

with some books, i’m okay with pure immersion or pure analysis, but with most i’m at a complete loss. the “classics” (problematic as they may be), or books read for class, for example, seem to demand a certain level of active engagement, but many are just as easily read as watching a movie (they stay relevant, for the most part, because they are well written). books i intend to read only for pleasure sometimes poke me awake, and i can end up falling victim to the prose of a book i’m reading only for information.

frankly, i’m not sure route causes me to lose out on more. when choosing one (something that never becomes fully apparent until i’ve finished reading), it always seems as though the other was the wiser decision.