How to Read

I did not learn how to read fiction until I got to graduate school. Really!!? (I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking, dear reader.) Okay, okay. I did not appreciate how to read stories or imaginative literature in an immersive fashion until I discovered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. Adler’s book is a manual for reading different “kinds” of things. Adler’s book is quite dry actually, and it reads like a manual. I don’t remember most of his advice but one thing stuck out: When reading stories that appeal to the imagination, try and find a space free of distractions and a chunk of time long enough to read the book in a single sitting if possible. While I had read fiction growing up, the Harry Potter books were the first ones in which I took Adler’s advice.

It makes me wonder whether my reading style led me to a steady diet of mainly non-fiction. With the exception of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, I mainly read non-fiction through my teenage years. By the time I was in my twenties, busier in college and working part-time, my reading habits consisted of 20-40 minutes before bed or a 30-minute chunk sometime during a break. This was the average time needed to read the average non-fiction chapter as long as the book was not too dense. I am usually reading several books at a time instead of sequentially finishing one before starting the next. This is still my main practice and I enjoy how ruminating on my readings can sometime coalesce in a magical way into an idea. Last month I read three books that may seem quite different (Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher, William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist), but they pushed me to significantly reconstruct my chemistry class next semester. More on that in a post next week, but in the meantime back to reading Harry Potter.

I first heard about Harry Potter while in graduate school in the U.S. before PotterMania took the country by storm. An undergraduate introduced me to the first book that a relative of his had obtained in the U.K. He claimed that once you started reading it, you could not put the book down. Apparently it was so compelling that this single battered copy was being passed from one person to another like wildfire. He was willing to lend me the book but I would have to wait a couple of weeks as there were a bunch of people ahead of me who had signed up to borrow it. I was skeptical at first (having not much interest in fiction at that point) and promptly forgot about it. Several years later I was browsing a Borders bookstore and espied the heavily advertised set of the first three books in their hardcover Scholastic editions. I remembered what my friend said and decided to buy it as a gift for my spouse who enjoys reading a lot. She couldn’t put the books down once she started reading! After she had finished and told me how excellent the books were without giving away the story, I was persuaded to have a go. This was when I decided to apply Adler’s rule for the very first time, reading the three books over three successive weekends by setting aside a 3-4 hour block for each book. It was a truly immersive experience, and since then I have applied it to any new fiction that I read! (I still read mostly non-fiction.)

As part of starting this blog, I decided to re-read the first book. I dutifully set aside all of yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. What did I notice this time around? Let me just share three things.

1. Having an agenda makes you read differently and notice different things. Given this blog, one of my goals was to take note of all scenes involving Potions. In the first class, Professor Snape gives a fantastic attention-grabbing opener about the “subtle science and exact art of potion-making”. I was encouraged to do a better job conveying why chemistry is so interesting and worth studying and also be sure not to call my students dunderheads as Snape does.

2. Halloween is significant and my memory is bad. I’m now doubly glad that I started this blog on Halloween. It’s the day that Voldemort visits and destroys the Potter home in Godric’s Hollow. It’s also the day that the three principal characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione, solidify their friendship after their encounter with the troll. I had forgotten the significance of Halloween in the first book.

3. Seeing the movies affects the reading of the books. While I appreciate the movies for providing excellent visuals in bringing to life places and scenes (I particularly enjoyed Diagon Alley and the great hall in Hogwarts), I now automatically picture the characters as personified by the actors and actresses. In fact I can no longer remember how I first pictured the characters before the movies. There was probably some fluidity and “building up” as the series progressed. In preparation for the release of a new book I would read all the previous books in succession, and my imagined picture of how the characters looked or how their voices sounded changed subtly with each reading. But now there is a fixity to the characters, and I can no longer imagine them looking and sounding differently. I have purposefully not watched the movies multiple times, but after eight movies, I find it difficult to imagine different-looking characters.

Moral of the story: Harry Potter is still enjoyable after multiple reads (and I have read it multiple times); this speaks to the power of a well-crafted story with characters that you care about. But it will never be the same as the first magical reading where you don’t know what is going to happen next. In a sense, life is like that, and I’m very glad (now that I’m older and have more hindsight) that I do not have a crystal ball to tell me what the future holds. It is much more magical to experience it the first time around, both through good times and bad.