I’ve lately been reading Emma, by Jane Austen. (Though I was temporarily derailed when I found Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos in the bargain bin at Borders.) Anyway, I started reading Emma in earnest because of the PBS Masterpiece Classic series “The Complete Jane Austen.” I have now viewed at least one movie version of all six of Jane Austen’s principal novels, though I’d only previously read Pride & Prejudice. And, I must admit, viewing the movie version of Emma before reading the book has helped immensely. Actually, I’m not sure if it is the movie itself that is helpful or just knowing the progression of the plot. In any case, I find myself reading more closely, picking up more textual clues about people’s true characters and Emma’s subtle, but important, misperceptions.
This experience with Emma made me reevaluate my reading skills and methods. I’m a compulsive, rapid reader. I tend to read and dump. (Likely a product of college English classes where professors would schedule a mere week for the reading of Anna Karenina or Dante’s Inferno.) I generally don’t read closely. Having just completed a book, I probably couldn’t tell you what color hair the heroine has. I jump over “unimportant” details like that, partly because I like to imagine the characters myself and partly because I’m in a hurry. I think miss a great deal in my hurry.
All of this reflection made me recall a chapter in Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer on close reading. In the very first chapter, Ms. Prose advocates getting back to reading basics and focusing on close reading, paying attention to the words and sentences and paragraphs.
Several websites supply variations on the theme of “how to conduct a close reading.” See websites here and here and here and here. Though lists and suggestions are a good place to start, the lists, I think, are a little too narrow. Most of them anticipate close reading conducted on short works of fiction like poetry or excerpts of longer works. It seems to me that close reading should be applied to all kinds of reading: literature, poetry, newspapers, technical manuals. Rather than a technique used in English papers, close reading should be a method, a form inseparable from our reading.
This definition of close reading sums it up for me: a method in which you pay close attention to a text, either in order to observe striking features generally or in order to answer specific questions concerning that text.
In light of the above, I hereby resolve to amend my reading habits by:
- Slowing down and enjoying the experience, the moments, of reading
- Reading with a pencil in hand
- Looking up words I don’t know
- Pausing occasionally to contemplate what I’ve just read
Buy Emma
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