The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps — and yet, Sutherland maintains, reading a novel well is almost as difficult as writing one well.
Perhaps the word ‘reading’ itself is the problem. Strictly speaking, reading is something you can either do or not do, and it’s not terribly difficult. We say that novels by Proust or Pynchon are ‘difficult reads’, but in fact a child of ten could read them: he or she just wouldn’t understand them. Serious readers use the word ‘reading’ as a metonym, to signify the whole process of consumption and comprehension.
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