How to get into reading | Damon Young

What you are doing right now is astonishing: reading.

We often take it for granted because the basic skills are gained so early. By the time we’re adults, the letters are transparent: we move straight from lines to universes. This is one reason why reading is so neglected as a craft. Like spectacles, it’s so close to us we can’t see it.

Reading is also more private – it lacks the public kudos of authorship. So we hear a great deal about writing: festivals, ‘how to’ guides in newspapers and magazines, courses, alongside raves and rages about indiv-idual authors. Readers remain out of the spotlight, rarely lauded for their labours. Many aspire to being great authors – few to being great readers.

Yet without readers there are no texts. We take the sensations – ink on paper, liquid crystal behind glass – and turn them into sense. To paraphrase Spider-Man #1, 1962: with this literary power comes responsibility. We have to translate words into worlds well. Not simply to do justice to writers – though this is important, if we want to judge their achievements. We read well also because otherwise we are wasting an opportunity for new experiences: vivid or muted, consoling or confronting, arousing or disgusting.

There is no rule to reading well – there are too many texts, contexts; too many works and interpreters. A simple law is impossible. (Though St Augustine tried:  we read the Bible, he said, to love God.)

In The Art of Reading, I highlight several virtues of reading: curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice. This sounds hand-wringingly moral-istic but virtue is simply another word for excellence. Specifically, a virtue is a tendency to do the right thing in the right time and place. It arises only from experience, and it tries to find the mean between extremes.

For example, it is cowardly to avoid Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts simply because it will challenge my stereotypes of gender and sexuality. But it is foolhardy to read AS Byatt’s Still Life if I realise certain plot points, after my wife’s grave illness, will leave me too dist-raught to be a good father and husband. Courage is facing what rightfully frightens me because the pages offer me something worthwhile. It is patient to move carefully through the (excruciatingly finicky) late novels of Henry James but not to pore over Dan Brown’s stories for esoteric facts.

In this sense, reading is not about cracking some code, ticking boxes in a checklist of the canon, or getting to know the secret of an author’s private life. It is a chance to recreate and revise experiences from more than 20 centuries of literary work. And to exercise our freedom as we do: liberating pages.

Damon Young’s The Art of Reading is out now in hardback (Scribe UK, £9.99)