{"id":137,"date":"2007-03-11T07:00:49","date_gmt":"2007-03-11T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/11\/how-to-read-a-book\/"},"modified":"2016-07-30T09:56:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-30T17:56:49","slug":"how-to-read-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/publishing\/how-to-read-a-book\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read a Book"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading, says <a title=\"elderkin on reading\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/79b7f75a-be2c-11db-bd86-0000779e2340.html\" target=\"_blank\">Susan Elderkin, in the Financial Times<\/a>, has become &#8220;a highly stressful business.&#8221; The main trouble, it seems, is that there are just too many books. How is one to choose? Elderkin, a novelist and fellow in creative writing says that &#8220;the number of books in the world is growing at five times the rate of the human population.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Apparently the best way to solve this problem is &#8230; to read another book. Like one of these:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Gabriel Zaid, <em>So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance<\/em><\/li>\n<li>John Sutherland, <em>How to Read a Novel: A User&#8217;s Guide<\/em><\/li>\n<li>John Mullan, <em>How Novels Work<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Nick Hornby, <em>The Complete Polysyllabic Spree<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Nick Rennison, ed., <em>Good Reading Guide<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In brief, Mexican critic Zaid psoesthe problem: &#8220;Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn&#8217;t read would pile up four thousand times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sutherland talks about judging books by ther covers, margins, and other design elements. He also proposes applying &#8220;the McLuhan test,&#8221; which is to read page 69, and buy the book if you like that page. Mullan seems to be a lit crit type, who breaks books down into how they use everything from parenthesis to paragraphs. His book is assembled from newspaper columns, as is Hornby&#8217;s, which amounts to a kind of reader&#8217;s journal. Hornby writes, &#8220;I am not particularly interested in language&#8221;; he prefers light books that can be read in one sitting. The <em>Good Reading Guide<\/em> is &#8220;great books&#8221; list of 400 titles.<\/p>\n<p>Regrettably, Elderkin&#8217;s review doesn&#8217;t give a much of a sense of the nature and content of the titles in her roundup, and it doesn&#8217;t come close of realizing its premise of addressing the problem of proliferating books proposed by Zaid. If you&#8217;ve read any of these books let me know what you think about them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading, says Susan Elderkin, in the Financial Times, has become &#8220;a highly stressful business.&#8221; The main trouble, it seems, is that there are just too many books. How&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[35,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4628,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/4628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}