To answer your questions for readers, I would describe myself as an unfocused and enthusiastic reader. I scurry from topic to topic, author to author, depending on how I feel. I see my appreciation of a book as being entirely subjective, saying more about me than it does about the book. For example, I was born without the interest most people have in astronauts, so it's difficult for me to enjoy a book about them, fiction or nonfiction. But I love books about hermits, and a book about one has a great chance of captivating me.
Exactly -- great point! I enjoy reading about hermits interacting with their environments and wrestling with their thoughts, but I don't enjoy reading about people interacting with or thinking about spaceships and space.
I'll have to check out Clear! Thanks for the recommendation!
Clear is on my TBR. I love novels where the land is a character and the land’s relationship to people is an important theme. I just finished reading Willa Cather’s Pioneers, O Pioneers and loved it. My understanding is Clear offers that connection to land (an island) that I find so fascinating.
Yes, I totally agree with this and recognize myself in this. I studied Literary Studies, and my main take-away from this period was the idea that the meaning of a text is created in the interplay, in the space between the writer and reader. This was fascinating to me, and really shaped my reading. If I remember correctly, this idea also came from Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, and the school of theory is also called 'reader-response criticism'. There's a very interesting wikipedia entry about that.
I will read more on reader response criticism and I am aware of that Barthes essay but never actually read it. The closest I came to reading literary theory was reading Derrida in political theory classes and I see many parallels in this idea of destabilizing the very notion of fixed meaning.
Waving my fist in the air with agreement from here. I also read to tap into emotion. I want to leave the time and place where I exist daily and dive deeply into someone else's being. I want to walk and think and breathe like someone else. It makes no difference to me if this is a character or a human who really lived. I ask the same thing of most nonfiction that I do of fiction: to be transported, not just to another era or location, but to another state of mind and then to see if there's anything new I want to bring back to my everyday life. Most often, there is.
And regarding past selves, I find this in the joy of rereading. I get to experience the book as I feel now, but also to feel my younger self, whether it's decades or months younger, and feel her peering over my shoulder, excited to see if I react the same way to the same passages. I'm about to reread A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I read and loved twenty ish years ago and cannot wait to feel the connection between present me, in her late 40s, and twenty-something me. I'll read it on holiday near the sea, which is how I read it the first time, although a different sea and a different continent. CANNOT WAIT.
So grateful you share so deeply here. For what it's worth, I never think you're sharing too much. It's a gift to receive these posts.
I absolutely loved reading your note, Caroline. Rosenblatt has this idea of "situated reading events"... basically suggesting that every act of reading is shaped by the reader’s mood, history, environment, purpose... which is BEST illustrated in the experience of re-reading. Because YOU change as a human being and your environment/context changes, of course your aesthetic experience of a book would change. I need to reread this a couple of times now and really make myself believe it because I typically resist rereading.
I haven't read Possession but I know that A.S. Byatt has a CULT following, including Sarah Chihaya who wrote Bibliophobia and devoted a significant portion of the book to Possession. I got so curious about it and watched the movie the same day I finished the book and I loved it, but I am sure the book is so much better!
You should definitely invite Chihaya on your podcast!!!
I’ve of the mind there’s no correct way to read, write, or create, but my personal litmus test involves the idea of something “ringing true.”
In my own writing, when something “rings true” on the page, and feels right, I can be confident it’ll do the same for the reader.
As a reader, I bring the entirety of my lived experience to the text and I seek that same sense of authenticity, realness, sincerity, whatever you want to call it. If something feels true to me, it’s an invitation from the author to immerse myself in the story. If it doesn’t, then no matter how great the prose or style, I’m not gonna buy in.
The humanity you bring to reading and this newsletter is why I adore you and it so much. 💗
This is also why I don't care to read professional book critiques. I need to know how a book made you feel if I'm going to consider buying/reading it. I think more and more readers are sharing this sentiment, hence why Booktok and Bookstack have taken off.
Loved this, "These are not questions a critic answers. They're questions a person lives."
I am cut from the same cloth, Petya. I am an aesthetic reader. I read to share the human experience with others and to feel less alone in the great wide world. I read to connect deeper to myself and to other people. Even if I loathe the characters or points in the plot, as long as I'm emotionally engaged, I'm in it to win it and finishing the book. (Leaving was a book I wanted to throw across the room many times, but I LOVED it.) Entering different worlds through books gives me a glimpse into how other people live and the choices they make, which I find endlessly fascinating. It's why I love memoirs so much.
The genres you (anyone) choose to read has much to do with emotional versus more intellectual reading as well. If you read for pleasure there is no "right way" to read. If you are engaged in formal criticism, you should notice and mention more than your feelings... Nice essay!
I hope I didn't come across as suggesting that I disrespect traditional / formal criticism. What I wanted to emphasize is the importance of trusting one's own sense of a book and not feeling like those thoughts and feelings are valid or worth sharing!
Re: genre - I have been thinking a lot about that because many of the readers around me are currently on a massive romance kick and I just can't allow myself to read that. The resistance makes me feel so curious...
That romance thing, I just can't do it either. I am a romantic, if that's what you mean by enjoying flowers, wine and kisses. But what I crave when I am reading is the experience of something different, something curious, something I didn't know before. It's so rarely found in a romance, that I skip them for the most part. For me? A resistance to boredom.
"meaning emerges in the transaction between reader and text." LOVE THAT. Thank you for this reminder that reading gives us whatever we need from it, and everyone's needs are not the same, and that is beautiful and okay. <3
I love this piece, Petya! As someone who studied literature in grad school, I would describe myself as a naturally analytical reader and I actually had to teach myself how to get back into the feeling side of reading. I've spent a lot of time consciously discerning what I do and don't like, because that never mattered in school! When I taught high school English, I often told my students that tapping into their feelings was a great place to start with a book. From there, you can ask "how did the author make me feel that way?" And what better kind of analysis is there than that?!
For what it's worth though, I also love the Messud quote you cited. I think it is extremely important to engage with what a book is and what it's trying to do, but--unlike this quote seems to suggest--I don't believe that's mutually exclusive from asking if I like it. I don't think asking what a book is means cracking some code or the type of formulaic analysis that happens in classrooms. Rather, I think it's just taking the book as it is: what is it trying to say, what is it trying to do, and--yes!--what is it trying to make us feel? Without engaging in those questions, I think we sometimes see book reviews that are more or less comparing the book as it is with the book we wanted it to be. This definitely has it's place! Writing through pieces like that has helped me figure out myself as a reader, and that is such an important part of the reading practice. But for me, reading is a dialogue between book and reader, but I can't have an authentic dialogue if I'm not trying to understand the book in good faith.
Of course, there isn't one right way to read and review, and one of the things I love most about literary Substack is getting so see so many styles of reading taking place in public! I've grown so much as a reader by engaging with your reading and that of our nerdy book crew in this space!
I see and agree with the distinction you are making! There was a recent review in NY Mag of the new Chimamanda book that got a lot of attention and criticism for being unfair to the book for the reason you pointed out. I haven't read the book yet so I don't know for sure but I can see how that would happen.
One thing that writing about books has forced me to do is look for EVIDENCE of how I feel. I don't think I need to apologize for not connecting with a book but I think it's important to at least try and articulate specific reasons WHY ... and that takes effort and, in my case, learning... but I have loved that and the nerd crew has definitely delivered!!!
I haven't read the Adichie book, but I did read that review! Sometimes I think when authors become entities, we see more reviews of their body of work, the ways we want it to evolve, and what we think they should focus on. The NYT review of Jesmyn Ward's most recent book was similar in that way.
I love your phrasing of "evidence of how I feel." I think you do that so well, which is why I always enjoy hearing about what you're loving and what you're not. It helps me know you as a reader better, but also provides me with more than enough to know if I want to try the book you're writing about!
So here is a thing Substack has done for me; I have given some thought to my reading choices and style. That is, all over the place. And here is why I determined it should stay that way: I am surely the most general of generalists. I am embracing it, and will continue to read fiction like its being burned faster than I can read it; also scientific papers, magazines, Substack, cookbooks, the nutritional requirements of dairy cattle, and anything else that I pick up.
Being at the same time a free spirit, and also very analytical, I am compelled to keeps a reading log (I have a database, what else when you're a programmer?) Reorganizing after ten-plus years of notes on books, I've been self-shamed for making bad notes, many of which are incomprehensible to me now. Lately, in my notes on books, I try to touch on 4 things:
Precis, or a short summary, because thousands of books later, I forget things;
What I liked;
What I didn't like;
Comments on the physical book, or edition.
Something I do a fair bit of is re-reads, especially of books I read 15 or 30 years ago, and then apply the test-of-time question. How did it stand up compared to my reaction many years ago? I learn a fair bit about myself by this method :)
I think I'm...an emotional close reader?? I'm definitely an aesthetic reader by nature but then got my BA in Humanities and my MA in Literature, so of course I learned close reading as part of literary analysis. So I feel I can switch gears, depending on a number of different factors, and even sometimes run both systems concurrently. How I choose my books, though (when I am reading on my own time) is almost wholly governed by how I feel. I want different books in the spring than I do in winter. And I find myself loving certain texts (Wuthering Heights, yoooo) that others don't so much, because even if the story is troubling or characters are "unlikeable," if it moves me or makes me feel a certain way, I am sold.
Petya, for what it is worth, I do think that the detached style of literary criticism is on its way out or at least being challenged by a style of criticism that incorporates the personal (led mostly by women, queer, and POC critics). For my MA thesis I wrote about Emily Brontë but incorporated a healthy dose of memoir, as she is a very personal writer for me. When I looked into more recent scholarship, I didn't find it hard at all to construct an argument for why this was an acceptable style to write a thesis in, and it was unanimously accepted by my panel.
Yes! I can absolutely relate to that, although my approach is still a little different: I have a PhD in French Literature, so I also I have a tendency to approach books from the analytical side. But I can (and do) completely shift gears when I really like a book. Then I turn into a reader, nothing else. I read the text in a "natural" way and then perhaps go back after I finished to find out, e.g., what tools the autho used to captivate my attention, to portray his characters, what the sound is and how it may change ... and so on.
I am really happy I found this substack today and will subscribe right now!
If anyone here is interested in literature from Europe and Latin America translated into English, take look at my substack:
Hi! Last week after reading your post: A notebook ecosystem I shared Rosenblatt’s name with you. I’m a recently retired teacher. I have been playing with the idea of a poem as a Close Reading. I’m finding it’s more manageable for me responding to poems this way. Reading what you wrote in this post reminded me of how I felt as I finished reading Dream Counts (Adiche) last week. A character in the story is assaulted. We live in a world where this happens to women a lot, way too much. Justice is rarely served. Reading the story I was reminded how much courage it must take for a woman to speak up and out. My emotional response. I talked to my partner about how the book made me feel and knew I needed to take a walk. Knowing that element of the story changed me.
Like you, Petya, I’ve come to believe that the courage to feel words and read subjectively isn’t a liability, but a kind of luminous intelligence, and one of my most beloved ways to stay alive to life.
I think I’m the kind of reader Georges Perros describes (always loved this quote): “Loving literature means being convinced that there is always a sentence written that will give us back the taste for life.”
Petya, I have a question about the subscription discount. My subscription shows that I received a 20% discount "for the first year" when I subscribed last May. Does that mean that my subscription will go up to the regular price when it renews in May? Is the discount you're offering this month also only for one year, or will it stay in effect for the length of the subscription?
To answer your questions for readers, I would describe myself as an unfocused and enthusiastic reader. I scurry from topic to topic, author to author, depending on how I feel. I see my appreciation of a book as being entirely subjective, saying more about me than it does about the book. For example, I was born without the interest most people have in astronauts, so it's difficult for me to enjoy a book about them, fiction or nonfiction. But I love books about hermits, and a book about one has a great chance of captivating me.
Thank you for this insightful essay!
OK - this is fascinating to read because can you imagine a more secluded environment than space?! But you don't like space, you like hermits!
I have a book recommendation for you: Clear by Carys Davies. It is moody, broody, and wonderful.
Exactly -- great point! I enjoy reading about hermits interacting with their environments and wrestling with their thoughts, but I don't enjoy reading about people interacting with or thinking about spaceships and space.
I'll have to check out Clear! Thanks for the recommendation!
Clear is on my TBR. I love novels where the land is a character and the land’s relationship to people is an important theme. I just finished reading Willa Cather’s Pioneers, O Pioneers and loved it. My understanding is Clear offers that connection to land (an island) that I find so fascinating.
Yes, I totally agree with this and recognize myself in this. I studied Literary Studies, and my main take-away from this period was the idea that the meaning of a text is created in the interplay, in the space between the writer and reader. This was fascinating to me, and really shaped my reading. If I remember correctly, this idea also came from Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, and the school of theory is also called 'reader-response criticism'. There's a very interesting wikipedia entry about that.
I will read more on reader response criticism and I am aware of that Barthes essay but never actually read it. The closest I came to reading literary theory was reading Derrida in political theory classes and I see many parallels in this idea of destabilizing the very notion of fixed meaning.
I see a small self-study guide forming!!!
Waving my fist in the air with agreement from here. I also read to tap into emotion. I want to leave the time and place where I exist daily and dive deeply into someone else's being. I want to walk and think and breathe like someone else. It makes no difference to me if this is a character or a human who really lived. I ask the same thing of most nonfiction that I do of fiction: to be transported, not just to another era or location, but to another state of mind and then to see if there's anything new I want to bring back to my everyday life. Most often, there is.
And regarding past selves, I find this in the joy of rereading. I get to experience the book as I feel now, but also to feel my younger self, whether it's decades or months younger, and feel her peering over my shoulder, excited to see if I react the same way to the same passages. I'm about to reread A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I read and loved twenty ish years ago and cannot wait to feel the connection between present me, in her late 40s, and twenty-something me. I'll read it on holiday near the sea, which is how I read it the first time, although a different sea and a different continent. CANNOT WAIT.
So grateful you share so deeply here. For what it's worth, I never think you're sharing too much. It's a gift to receive these posts.
I absolutely loved reading your note, Caroline. Rosenblatt has this idea of "situated reading events"... basically suggesting that every act of reading is shaped by the reader’s mood, history, environment, purpose... which is BEST illustrated in the experience of re-reading. Because YOU change as a human being and your environment/context changes, of course your aesthetic experience of a book would change. I need to reread this a couple of times now and really make myself believe it because I typically resist rereading.
I haven't read Possession but I know that A.S. Byatt has a CULT following, including Sarah Chihaya who wrote Bibliophobia and devoted a significant portion of the book to Possession. I got so curious about it and watched the movie the same day I finished the book and I loved it, but I am sure the book is so much better!
You should definitely invite Chihaya on your podcast!!!
Ooooh. Loving all of this. Sarah Chihaya does indeed sound like an excellent guest. I will report back on the reread experience 🩷
I’ve of the mind there’s no correct way to read, write, or create, but my personal litmus test involves the idea of something “ringing true.”
In my own writing, when something “rings true” on the page, and feels right, I can be confident it’ll do the same for the reader.
As a reader, I bring the entirety of my lived experience to the text and I seek that same sense of authenticity, realness, sincerity, whatever you want to call it. If something feels true to me, it’s an invitation from the author to immerse myself in the story. If it doesn’t, then no matter how great the prose or style, I’m not gonna buy in.
This may be my favorite post ever. Thanks for saying these things Petya. So glad to have you here among the people reading the wrong way.
Mila said, "WE are book readers, mom."
Yes to all of this!!! I FEEL SO SEEN.
The humanity you bring to reading and this newsletter is why I adore you and it so much. 💗
This is also why I don't care to read professional book critiques. I need to know how a book made you feel if I'm going to consider buying/reading it. I think more and more readers are sharing this sentiment, hence why Booktok and Bookstack have taken off.
Loved this, "These are not questions a critic answers. They're questions a person lives."
I am cut from the same cloth, Petya. I am an aesthetic reader. I read to share the human experience with others and to feel less alone in the great wide world. I read to connect deeper to myself and to other people. Even if I loathe the characters or points in the plot, as long as I'm emotionally engaged, I'm in it to win it and finishing the book. (Leaving was a book I wanted to throw across the room many times, but I LOVED it.) Entering different worlds through books gives me a glimpse into how other people live and the choices they make, which I find endlessly fascinating. It's why I love memoirs so much.
The genres you (anyone) choose to read has much to do with emotional versus more intellectual reading as well. If you read for pleasure there is no "right way" to read. If you are engaged in formal criticism, you should notice and mention more than your feelings... Nice essay!
I hope I didn't come across as suggesting that I disrespect traditional / formal criticism. What I wanted to emphasize is the importance of trusting one's own sense of a book and not feeling like those thoughts and feelings are valid or worth sharing!
Re: genre - I have been thinking a lot about that because many of the readers around me are currently on a massive romance kick and I just can't allow myself to read that. The resistance makes me feel so curious...
That romance thing, I just can't do it either. I am a romantic, if that's what you mean by enjoying flowers, wine and kisses. But what I crave when I am reading is the experience of something different, something curious, something I didn't know before. It's so rarely found in a romance, that I skip them for the most part. For me? A resistance to boredom.
"meaning emerges in the transaction between reader and text." LOVE THAT. Thank you for this reminder that reading gives us whatever we need from it, and everyone's needs are not the same, and that is beautiful and okay. <3
yes. AND it will change for each of us over the course of a lifetime, which is so fascinating to observe.
I love this piece, Petya! As someone who studied literature in grad school, I would describe myself as a naturally analytical reader and I actually had to teach myself how to get back into the feeling side of reading. I've spent a lot of time consciously discerning what I do and don't like, because that never mattered in school! When I taught high school English, I often told my students that tapping into their feelings was a great place to start with a book. From there, you can ask "how did the author make me feel that way?" And what better kind of analysis is there than that?!
For what it's worth though, I also love the Messud quote you cited. I think it is extremely important to engage with what a book is and what it's trying to do, but--unlike this quote seems to suggest--I don't believe that's mutually exclusive from asking if I like it. I don't think asking what a book is means cracking some code or the type of formulaic analysis that happens in classrooms. Rather, I think it's just taking the book as it is: what is it trying to say, what is it trying to do, and--yes!--what is it trying to make us feel? Without engaging in those questions, I think we sometimes see book reviews that are more or less comparing the book as it is with the book we wanted it to be. This definitely has it's place! Writing through pieces like that has helped me figure out myself as a reader, and that is such an important part of the reading practice. But for me, reading is a dialogue between book and reader, but I can't have an authentic dialogue if I'm not trying to understand the book in good faith.
Of course, there isn't one right way to read and review, and one of the things I love most about literary Substack is getting so see so many styles of reading taking place in public! I've grown so much as a reader by engaging with your reading and that of our nerdy book crew in this space!
I see and agree with the distinction you are making! There was a recent review in NY Mag of the new Chimamanda book that got a lot of attention and criticism for being unfair to the book for the reason you pointed out. I haven't read the book yet so I don't know for sure but I can see how that would happen.
One thing that writing about books has forced me to do is look for EVIDENCE of how I feel. I don't think I need to apologize for not connecting with a book but I think it's important to at least try and articulate specific reasons WHY ... and that takes effort and, in my case, learning... but I have loved that and the nerd crew has definitely delivered!!!
I haven't read the Adichie book, but I did read that review! Sometimes I think when authors become entities, we see more reviews of their body of work, the ways we want it to evolve, and what we think they should focus on. The NYT review of Jesmyn Ward's most recent book was similar in that way.
I love your phrasing of "evidence of how I feel." I think you do that so well, which is why I always enjoy hearing about what you're loving and what you're not. It helps me know you as a reader better, but also provides me with more than enough to know if I want to try the book you're writing about!
Happy anniversary to your newsletter. Glad you didn’t let feeling amateur stop you, and you are still writing about your reading for the love of it!
So here is a thing Substack has done for me; I have given some thought to my reading choices and style. That is, all over the place. And here is why I determined it should stay that way: I am surely the most general of generalists. I am embracing it, and will continue to read fiction like its being burned faster than I can read it; also scientific papers, magazines, Substack, cookbooks, the nutritional requirements of dairy cattle, and anything else that I pick up.
Being at the same time a free spirit, and also very analytical, I am compelled to keeps a reading log (I have a database, what else when you're a programmer?) Reorganizing after ten-plus years of notes on books, I've been self-shamed for making bad notes, many of which are incomprehensible to me now. Lately, in my notes on books, I try to touch on 4 things:
Precis, or a short summary, because thousands of books later, I forget things;
What I liked;
What I didn't like;
Comments on the physical book, or edition.
Something I do a fair bit of is re-reads, especially of books I read 15 or 30 years ago, and then apply the test-of-time question. How did it stand up compared to my reaction many years ago? I learn a fair bit about myself by this method :)
I think I'm...an emotional close reader?? I'm definitely an aesthetic reader by nature but then got my BA in Humanities and my MA in Literature, so of course I learned close reading as part of literary analysis. So I feel I can switch gears, depending on a number of different factors, and even sometimes run both systems concurrently. How I choose my books, though (when I am reading on my own time) is almost wholly governed by how I feel. I want different books in the spring than I do in winter. And I find myself loving certain texts (Wuthering Heights, yoooo) that others don't so much, because even if the story is troubling or characters are "unlikeable," if it moves me or makes me feel a certain way, I am sold.
Petya, for what it is worth, I do think that the detached style of literary criticism is on its way out or at least being challenged by a style of criticism that incorporates the personal (led mostly by women, queer, and POC critics). For my MA thesis I wrote about Emily Brontë but incorporated a healthy dose of memoir, as she is a very personal writer for me. When I looked into more recent scholarship, I didn't find it hard at all to construct an argument for why this was an acceptable style to write a thesis in, and it was unanimously accepted by my panel.
Yes! I can absolutely relate to that, although my approach is still a little different: I have a PhD in French Literature, so I also I have a tendency to approach books from the analytical side. But I can (and do) completely shift gears when I really like a book. Then I turn into a reader, nothing else. I read the text in a "natural" way and then perhaps go back after I finished to find out, e.g., what tools the autho used to captivate my attention, to portray his characters, what the sound is and how it may change ... and so on.
I am really happy I found this substack today and will subscribe right now!
If anyone here is interested in literature from Europe and Latin America translated into English, take look at my substack:
anettepieper.substack.com
This is why I’m addicted to your Substack. Thank you for putting this into words! ❤️
🥹🥹🥹
Hi! Last week after reading your post: A notebook ecosystem I shared Rosenblatt’s name with you. I’m a recently retired teacher. I have been playing with the idea of a poem as a Close Reading. I’m finding it’s more manageable for me responding to poems this way. Reading what you wrote in this post reminded me of how I felt as I finished reading Dream Counts (Adiche) last week. A character in the story is assaulted. We live in a world where this happens to women a lot, way too much. Justice is rarely served. Reading the story I was reminded how much courage it must take for a woman to speak up and out. My emotional response. I talked to my partner about how the book made me feel and knew I needed to take a walk. Knowing that element of the story changed me.
Thank you SO MUCH Jamie!!! I am so grateful that the algorithm brought us together to talk books, poetry, and notebooks together!
Like you, Petya, I’ve come to believe that the courage to feel words and read subjectively isn’t a liability, but a kind of luminous intelligence, and one of my most beloved ways to stay alive to life.
I think I’m the kind of reader Georges Perros describes (always loved this quote): “Loving literature means being convinced that there is always a sentence written that will give us back the taste for life.”
I also ordered the Rosenblatt book! ✨
Petya, I have a question about the subscription discount. My subscription shows that I received a 20% discount "for the first year" when I subscribed last May. Does that mean that my subscription will go up to the regular price when it renews in May? Is the discount you're offering this month also only for one year, or will it stay in effect for the length of the subscription?
Oh, good question. Let me look into it and I will message you. I