Nietzsche wrote, that in an age of work ‘that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to "get things done", what is needed is an approach that will teach us 'how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar'.
A professor of English literature, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out in this books to share his love for reading and to gently nudge those of us who have either never experienced, or have forgotten, the act of slow and leisurely reading — the sort of reading that we probably did quite naturally when we were children, when we had our ‘mental doors ajar’; re-reading, dwelling on words and sentences as corresponding images formed in our minds, finishing a book and going right back to the beginning because why ever not? Spending time with a book purely for pleasure.
I'm not sure I have read many books this way since becoming a bookseller. My reading changed a few years ago because all of a sudden I was trying to cram a much larger number of books into the limited time available. I was reading for the bookshop, and felt I had to read quickly, and to cover as wide a wide range of subjects and authors as I possibly could.
This book found me at a time when I felt a strong desire to slow down. To read not just at a more leisurely pace but in a deeper, more engaged manner - re-reading passages that make me pause and think, underlining, annotating, the works. The way I used to read.
In her 1926 speech 'How Should One Read a Book?' Virginia Woolf talked about the sheer number of novels, poems, memoirs and other kinds of writing that 'jostle each other' for our attention. 'Where are we to begin?' she asked. 'How are we to bring order into this multitudinal chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?'
Look Closer is a handy guide in our quest to answer this question. Douglas-Fairhurst uses examples from literature, both classic and contemporary, from George Eliot to Sally Rooney, to describe the various elements in a literary work that we could pay closer attention to, as we read, that would make for a more meaningful reading experience.
He explains how the opening paragraph usually has clues, and sets up the work in some way, so we would do well to spend a bit of time here, to evaluate the author’s choice of words…by way of example, Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell begins with: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. We know something’s off as we read this, that this world is probably not like ours.
Other aspects he writes about include the interpretive power of illustrations, ambiguity, how a conversation in a novel can reveal much more than the words being exchanged, how writers build their characters in fiction - sometimes seeming so real with rich inner lives, and sometimes flat.
He also talks about points of view, unreliable narrators, the naming of characters, how a writer can write non-human characters (I have to read Flush by Virginia Woolf!), creating imaginary worlds, atmosphere (yes, the thunderstorms and the moors in Wuthering Heights are the perfect example), good and bad writing about sex, and many more things besides.
Not every book we pick up might demand this kind of attention from us, or need to be “chewed and digested”, to borrow a phrase from Francis Bacon, but whenever we feel instinctively that time and diligence will be rewarded, we would do well to slow down, keep our pencil (or stickers) handy, and engage.