Reading I presume here that you (or I, or we...) are either currently reading a book, or plan to read one in the near future. I also presume that you (or, I or we...) genuinely feel the book is worth investing some of our all-too-brief remaining life-time in. If the book is not worth reading, and there is no extrinsic reason for wasting time on it -- like trying to keep from flunking out of college to avoid getting drafted to go to "Nam" and possibly come back a paraplegic or in a body bag... --, then I strongly advise getting a different book or spending the time doing something other than reading. Reading a book competes with all our other life-possibilities in our deliberations how to get the greatest satisfaction and benefit out of each moment we have left to live. Reading and the book The book plays a role in reading besides "being" (i.e., having content aka words in it...) worth reading. I see reading as a conversation with the book -- albeit the book can't directly respond to what I think about it. I write my thoughts, parts of my "converation with the text" in the margins and underline and otherwise mark up the text (including making cross-references: textual "hyperlinks"...). Therefore: A book should have commodious margins and not be stingy with inter-lineal space. I am currently reading the Oxford Univ. Press paperback of R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History; this book has remarkably small margins (somewhat less then 5/8"), which get in the way of my "conversation with the text". I think a 1" margin is fine (anything less than 7/8" seems "cramped"), and, I think, a large page size "asks" for something extra. To repeat: White space on the page is important for facilitating the conversation between the reader and the text. You may deduce that I am opposed to borrowing books from a library, as opposed to owning the book, since one cannot write in a library book, and even if one can write in a library book, one has to return the book to the library and thereby lose one's thoughts. 1. The book should be very much! worth reading. More worth reading than any other book one might at this time read instead. It is worth investing time researching if there are any better posibilities one does not know about. 2. Reading is a conversation with the book's text (to further one's cultural self-formation aka "Bildung"). 3. One should permanently possess the book to facilitate item #2, including writing copious comments (not just "notes") in the book. 4. The physical design of the book should make reading pleasant and facilitate item #3. Reading alone Almost all my reading is reading alone, i.e., reading in the absence of a context of other persons caring about what I am reading. There are no other persons to whom my reading means anything. This merely personal context is half-way to no context, like trying to design a building for no particular site. Over several decades, I have developed a personal context to situate my reading: Concerns, interests, questions... I bring to a book, as already activated agenda in my life. But when I was a young person, I had no such agenda, so that reading was close to being altogether ("purely", in a non-honorific sense...) lacking in context and orientation. Surely part of the socialization of the child should be to develop such a context of individual interests (but my childrearing and schooling did not do this for me). Item: How can words deserve to exist? (I expect the words in the books I read to meet, an essential aspect of which is to further elaborate, the criteria.) I try to do my best with my solipsistic reading. But if I cannot figure out what the text is trying to say, I generally after a while give up and, if I feel it was worth trying to understand, I place a question mark ("?") in the margin, to mark the place where my undertsanding failed. (I hypothesize a use for teachers is to help get thru such road blocks on the road to knowledge and wisdom, but I have rarely if ever had that experience. See Dilbert cartoon, Below) Reading with others You, my reader, may ask why I have two categories here: (1) "Reading with others", and (2) "Reading with good friends"? The second, I hope to show you, is the honorifically proper occupation (way to spend time...) of human persons -- an idea I got from Dr. François Rabelais, via a recommendation from my Ed.D. dissertation advisor, Professor Robbie McClintock. By "reading with others", I mean a wide variety of contexts in which the text and the individual's understanding of it, have social relevance, i.e., situations where if I don't understand the text, or if I see something in the text others do not, that matters to "us". i.e., to both myself and to the others. If you, my reader, will allow computer programs to be included as texts, then programmers trying to figure out and fix "bugs" in the code provide a frequently occurring example of "reading with others". I am unfamiliar with similarly salient examples having to do with real books in our society, but perhaps lawyers, translaters, military code-breakers, diplomats... would be better able to adduce examples. Leisured reading with good friends Reading with others need not be either leisured or friendly. The computer bug (or intercepted coded enemy military message) may need to be understood ASAP. The persons working together on gaining mutual understanding of the text may be boss and employee (who are not similarly engaged in gaining appreciation of each other's aspirations in life, etc.). But we can also imagine -- Rabelais described -- good friends engaging, in their leisure, in the shared pursuit of wisdom. This can include trying to understand what others have said that might help further their shared endeavor to understand the possibilities for a good life, and each make it real in his or her personal life in the context of shaping their life together. We can imagine a few good-friends-and-peers, relaxing around a table in one of their personal libraries, with a fine view of Mt. Fuji or other evocative vista, with good bread and wine and cheese, discussing some text(s) that interested them, perhaps Plato or Montaigne or Husserl.... Rabelais envisioned both such activity, and such a place where it would be at home: The Abbey of Thélème. Walter Ong has described a suggestive real-life experience. The most proper subject of reading is the cultivation of the process of reading, the most proper aspect of which is cultivation of social space which cultivates such cultivation....

Leisure is the basis of culture.

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Revisit the Tower of Babel.
Read about Rabelais' Abbey of Thélème.
 

Learn  Jan Szczepanski's ideas concerning Individuality and Society. Think  about the role of philosophy in daily life: The vulnerability of the human spirit. Read  Edmund Husserl's lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935). Learn why a city can deserve to exist (Louis Kahn).
Read about my process of writing my Ed.D. dissertation. Consider  a potential powerful use for general encyclopedias in our new digital age, in Personal Knowledge Assistants (PKAs).

 
Browse list of some of my (BMcC) favorite books.

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See how a reader can also be a fool.

Go to website Table of Contents. Return to Brad McCormick's home page. Return to site map.

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http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/sq/reading.html Copyright © 2003-2005 Brad McCormick, Ed.D. bradmcc@cloud9.net 11 April 2006CE (2006-04-11 ISO 8601) v02.09 [Panels 1 and 2 of a 3 panel Dilbert cartoon.]