Eye Exercise – Introduction

If we pair Lem’s Law with Bayard’s observation that we forget much of what we read, misremember what we recall, and tend to be unchanged when we put down a book, we can only conclude that we’re poor readers (Stanislaw 1986, 2; Bayard 2007). Ideally, we read in circles: our prior knowledge and experience condition how we interpret a text; this interpretation broadens our understanding; this understanding contributes to our interpretation of subsequent texts and situations. This knowledge and experience constitute a schema, and as our schema grows, we grow. We are aware of how books should work, can work, yet typically experience them instrumentally, cheaply, and transiently.

If you’re taking the time to read, why not read a title worthy of your time in such a way that it can leave an indelible trace? Even if you’re reading for relaxation, with no presumption of permanence, richer titles read with attention make for more compelling escapism. Books make better companions, distractions, and teachers when they challenge and engage us.

Reading is a skill, and skills are developed not merely through repetition but focused, deliberate practice. We don’t become better readers if we don’t know what that entails, if we don’t learn from experts like the people profiled in this volume, and if we don’t practice. There is no correct way of reading, but we will argue that some are ineffective.

Our schemas are how we see ourselves, our books, and our world. They are mental representations of concepts and their connections. By understanding the hermeneutic circle in which we interpret, in which our schemas are employed and updated, we become better rounded; our world’s circumference broadens, becoming more inclusive yet easier to navigate.

If we forget much of what we read, we must be intentional about the books we choose. They should be relevant to our purpose in reading, worthy of our attention, and challenge us enough that we hone our skills. We can begin, then, with the question: what criteria should we use in selecting books which can truly affect us?

The two lists, bestsellers and “great books”, suggest preliminary answers. The one promotes the modern, fresh, contemporary, and popular; the other, the classic, time-honoured, revered, and foundational. They exemplify principles for literary selection.

The bestsellers are ostensibly those currently commercially successful in a particular market. The market has spoken, but all it has said is that publishers persuaded enough people to purchase certain titles. These sales don’t reflect considered or critical judgement, merely hype.

Perhaps a bestseller is at least representative of the zeitgeist—our collective cultural schema, what our peers are reading and talking about? Somewhat, but reading often lags purchase, and there are many reasons to buy a book that you don’t intend to read immediately. Eco’s “antilibrary” of unread books, for example, reflected his belief that books are more valuable when they’re unread, embodying the spirit of tsundoku, the Japanese neologism for the practice of acquiring books and letting them stack up without reading them (Taleb 2007, 1–2; Shockey 2020, 100).

hooks suggests that a current, popular book can be worth reading for the discussion it generates: it’s the “storytelling that creates community” (McLeod 1998). The sentiment is valuable, but has only limited relevance to literary selection and, as Bayard explained, such discussions often use a book as a mere prompt, not requiring you to have actually read it (Bayard 2007, 145, 150, 162). When people appear to talk about new books, they’re often talking about reviews and commentary of them, especially for non-fiction.

Popularity may not be a proxy for greatness, but it does imply a degree of readability assumed absent in the classic—it promises that the text is approachable. The image of the unreadable classic is often outdated, however, with contemporary translations making ancient texts more readable than their reputation implies. But even if a book is easy to read, this counts for little if it has nothing to say. Perhaps a book is difficult because it has something important to impart? Bestsellers may, of course, be both deep and readable, but this is difficult to determine at the height of their popularity.

Calvino suggests that our present time is “always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either backwards or forwards”, so we should “skilfully [alternate] classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material” (Calvino 1999, 8). Yet the resounding consensus amongst our thinkers is against the contemporary altogether. This can have the ring of dusty conservatism where antiquity is an argument in itself, clashing with our liberal culture. The bestseller may be shallow, but at least suggests the possibility of a modern, fresh perspective.

The compromise is to use posterity as a criterion for literary selection. A book need not be ancient to be worthwhile, but should have been tested by time. Emerson suggested waiting at least a year after publication; Sontag, 25-30 years after the author stops working (Emerson 1912, 196; Sontag 1995, 240). This feels more progressive, at least, and allows for older titles to be reevaluated.

In the present, a book’s notoriety and fame become hopelessly intertwined (Emerson 1912, 196). Posterity picks them apart by evaluating from a later context, when one is no longer enmeshed in the conditions that gave rise to the book: knowing what came after it, a more sober judgement can be reached. The delay it introduces between publication and reading does not diminish a worthwhile book: texts “speak across centuries” when their “very untimeliness renders them newly timely” (Felski 2008, 119). Posterity argues against the newest releases on the basis that so many books have withstood generations of criticism, it’s reckless to spend scant reading time on the recent. Posterity is a suspension of judgement.

Fiction’s power doesn’t depend on being up-to-date, but perhaps non-fiction’s does? Bestselling non-fiction appeals to the general public by making provocative original claims, but these claims, by their nature, haven’t been evaluated by experts. So, to the extent that some grand, new idea is exciting, it’s also probably wrong in equally interesting ways. There is a contradiction in wanting to know the latest information and the truth. Without posterity as a yardstick, the reader must rely on their background knowledge and expertise to judge—knowledge that they may not even realise they lack.

Posterity combines with influence to create the classic, such as the first modern novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It earned a positive critical consensus over generations, and made a meaningful impact on culture. The novel tells of a Spanish gentleman who reads chivalric fiction obsessively to the point that he believes he is a knight errant, and journeys around Spain behaving as one. Cervantes was inspired by the chivalric fiction he satirised. Flaubert cited this novel as an inspiration of his classic, Madame Bovary, whose titular character, Emma Bovary, bears similarities to Quixote in her misuse of fiction. A work’s influences, however, are never singular or linear. Both authors were also influenced by the societies that they lived in, and their lifetime of reading. Further, Frye saw a universality underlying literature: readers and writers think and work within an intertextual web (Frye 2006a, 417; Frye 2009, 407). Archetypes are mutated and transmitted, linking texts across time—through influences all books are connected.

The concept of influence encompasses explicit references to older texts, allusions to iconic figures and scenarios, and implicit employment of an earlier author’s concepts. Don Quixote directly references Plato’s Republic, alludes to the Homeric epics, and incorporates the spirit of Romantic and chivalric fiction by integrating the register of chivalry and the impromptu recital of sonnets by various characters. To read with knowledge of this intertextuality is to notice connections, and therefore enrich your experience of reading both the source texts and their influences. The more familiarity we have with influential works, the more they have been assimilated into our schemata, the easier we may traverse these links between books: we see more when we read. If we’re not aware of an allusion because we’re not familiar with its source, then we’re likely to read literally and therefore shallowly.

This helps explain why influential books are so valued, but should influence operate as a proxy for literary selection? Bayard reassures us that we aren’t compelled to read books purely on account of their influence, because their archetypes, concepts, and aesthetics, escape the text into our culture (Bayard 2007, 10–12). He conceived of our cultural literacy as an ad hoc, disorganised, misremembered network of book titles, key plot points, conceptions of famous authors, and knots of associations between these nodes. The intertextual web and network of such trivia that we each possess is our cultural schema. We share a culture to the extent that our cultural schemata overlap. Flaubert’s was partly constituted by Cervantes’; Flaubert’s readers are partly constituted by both. We can’t help but read and write these influences because together they constitute how we understand the world.

A book, therefore, need not be read by those it influences. Emma Bovary read romance novels in such a way that bovarism has entered English dictionaries to denote a person’s domination by a romantic or unreal conception of themselves. Quixotic was derived from Cervantes’ novel to mean impracticality in pursuit of ideals, a failure to distinguish reality from imagination. The Bible has immensely influenced people who haven’t fully read it; and the influence of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche far outstripped their readership.

The Bible, Don Quixote, and other “great books” are almost antipodal to the bestsellers. They constitute the Western Canon, the supreme classics, but ultimately, like the bestsellers, this is simply a list. Whereas the bestseller list grants the market the right to curate and rank its titles, this list is formed on more subjective grounds. The Western Canon implicitly makes the descriptive claim that its titles were the most influential and highly regarded, and the normative claim that these books are the absolute best, demanding to be read to the exclusion of others. It purports to solve our problem of what titles are worthy of our time.

Its descriptive claim suggests an exercise in literary history—a mapping of the recursive web of influence—and implies a procedure to rank the titles. Yet the typically implicit nature of allusions, uncredited sources, and the sheer amount of texts to consider make this at best a long-term project for a colossal committee. Indeed, the two principal attempts at enumerating the Western Canon relied on the books well-known to the few men who compiled them plus an ad hoc methodology. The first version of Adler’s Great Books of the Western World exemplified a few dead white males. Bloom’s attempt included more diversity, but was the product of a few hours’ work, and he subsequently disowned it (Pearson 2008). The compilers selected titles already integrated into their cultural schemas.

We breathe an air of influences unbounded by hemispheres, yet The Canon is synonymous with the West. Its most influential book was written across the Middle East, Babylon, and Egypt, and its impact surely depended on this cross-cultural genesis. Are we not past the era of privileging the West as if the maps of our culture delimited the Prime Meridian with hic sunt dracones? Are we claiming that the foundational texts of the Middle East, China, and India have no merit while a lesser known Greek tragedy does?

There is some core to these lists generally agreed upon: Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, and Sophocles, for example. In fact they’re so dominated by the ancients that we may wonder why anyone has bothered to write since. Are these titles really the apotheosis of literature? This brings us to the normative claim: because these books are so old and influential, they’re the best there is. Critics of the Western Canon take the position that not only is it self-perpetuating—influential because each generation is taught it—reflecting historico-socio-economic prejudices, but that elevating a handful of predominantly white men from a single continent, writing centuries ago, as the ideal, is preposterous.

This is true. Yet, while the critics’ normative claim is reasonable, their descriptive claim is not: we can stipulate that a highly celebrated masterpiece today was once tragically overlooked and yet wasn’t influential in any way. Its lack of influence by no means reflects its merit. And here lies the crux: the defenders of the Western Canon, however misguided their selection criteria, are surely correct that some of the most influential and highly regarded works of literature in the past were the product of a homogeneous handful of white men, and their opponents are surely correct that if we approach the question of what the best books are now, we end up with a very different list. One list cannot fulfil both functions.

These debates over the Canon trace back to a crucial misconception. When we have talked of lists of books, implied a scale of value, and applied epithets such as “classic”, we have erred as most early critics did in behaving like fish who do not know what water is. Deeply entrenched in a schema of norms and values, we don’t realise their contingency, and that they could be different. Fish, no relation, uses the phrase interpretative community to describe a similar concept, which we will adapt to mean a group of people with shared norms and values for interpreting texts—a common schema for this purpose (Fish 1980, 171). The fish were in an implicit interpretative community, ignorant of others.

Bestsellers, great books, and classics are always relative to such a community. A canon is only useful when conceived in this relative fashion, as a product of an interpretative community, with a restricted scope, and recognised as its creators’ judgement. Indeed, the values of an interpretative community expressed in its canonical texts provide a starting point for literary selection. The best we can do is deprioritise the Canon in favour of each interpretative community maintaining their own canon. After all, as Self argues, the Canon’s critics aren’t against the principle, just its contents: they want to recreate it in their image (Self 2022, 269).

The defenders of the Canon earnestly insist on the primacy of their list because it’s how they’ve been enculturated. It’s embedded, directly or by reference, in their schemata, but not just by the web of influences we’ve described. Reading a book involves inferring norms of interpretation; and norms imply values. Being schooled in a particular interpretative community, associating with people with this common background, finding norms reinforced by subsequent texts you read and conversations you have, make these norms and values feel like the norms and the values.

What about our values? Why do we need either list when we have noses? Johnson advocated pleasure as the principle by which we should take up and, when it diminishes, put down, books: to follow our instincts (Johnson 1825a, 370). Certainly, our mental relationships between concepts are partly weighted by frequency of use and emotional valence, yet this valence need not be positive. A book can affect us because it saddens us, for example. We’re affected when the text elicits aspects of our self schema—our beliefs, experiences, and interests. Our greatest interest is ourselves. Our self schema is our most dominant schema, our most dense, so a relationship of this kind is memorable and integrated into our self-conception. Quixote’s knight-errant schema became so profoundly connected with his self-schema that his conception of himself radically shifted. So, books don’t have to be pleasurable to be meaningful and memorable to us, only inspire a strong emotional response.

If we substitute pleasure for emotionality, then, for the latter to function as a proxy for literary selection, we must be able to anticipate a book’s affect on us. This is a judgement about how the book will interact with our self-schema that we reach before reading. The signals available to us are, unfortunately, readily exploited by marketers, media, and our tendency to track trends. The original, controversial, well-marketed title seems to convey greater potential for emotional heft than one lower down in the pile due to the volume of the discourse it generates. Without a great deal of experience in literary selection, our taste is poor. Our noses lead us to the newly ripe rather than the finely aged. This is hard to hear because we identify with our tastes, we are partly constituted by our values—we definitely know what interests us! But the underdeveloped schema of the immature reader manifests as pica: they eat dirt like their neighbour and enthuse about it. The popular and the recent are so much more accessible that posterity’s urging is often ignored. We don’t know what we’re missing, so we miss out.

This affective projection is a background hum for the immature reader, which transforms into a melody as their taste refines, as their palate becomes more nuanced, but prior to this point we must read somewhat on faith, guided by posterity. Typically, this entails selecting classic titles that appeal to our tastes and interests—aspects of our self-schema that are more apparent to us. Our immature tastes combined with the judgement of posterity render literary selection feasible initially; subsequently, as our taste develops we may kick away the ladder of canonicity. We must accept that the revered classics tend not to appear appealing at face value. However, once we look beyond the cover and engage with them, we find ourselves affected in unexpected, long-term ways, as countless previous generations celebrated. Emotionality, then, is an important metric in selecting literature but difficult to use as a primary proxy until we have refined our tastes. It is a sense to be cultivated indirectly.

Neither emotionality nor posterity protect us from the fate of the defenders of the Western Canon or Quixote, however. The hidebound critics did read according to considered judgements of the past, and surely were affected emotionally by powerful works. Quixote was clearly altered fundamentally by what he read. Both types of reader, however, were unable to resist our innate tendency to be led down comfortable rabbit holes. Our expectations of how the world works are conditioned by our frequent experiences—real or literary—which confirm our expectations because we tend to ignore disconfirming evidence, and this becomes how the world should work. The hermeneutic circle threatens to become a death spiral.

This disposition is exacerbated by age, because the more confirming experiences we have, the more we believe them true, and the less we consider alternatives. We tend more and more to conform to habit: reading to confirm our beliefs or mentally reenact variations of prior experiences. In the meantime our culture is changing, leading our perception of our world to become less accurate. We remember best the paths we keep walking, and those on which we had significant experiences, but retracing our steps won’t take us anywhere new. When selecting texts with the approbation of posterity, we wish to avoid the narrowness associated with the Western Canon’s champions, implicit interpretative communities, and the stereotype of the old person who is inflexible, bigoted, and pedantic. How do we select titles that will not contribute to our horizons narrowing, our thinking becoming stereotyped, and our burial in burrows where only echoes resound? How can we grow as we age?

Quixote contorted his world to conform to the fictional universe his novels mutually reinforced; the critics became so enamoured with a particular set of norms and perspectives, that they devalued others and therefore the Other. Ngũgĩ, a Kenyan subject of British colonisers, saw this problem from the Other’s perspective: literature, for him, was shot through with power relations that favoured the “master” (2012, 31). The master’s conception of history was that ignorance reigned in countries prior to their arrival, or masters and bondsmen were already existing—people are born one or the other and human nature is unchanging. Further, the current system can’t be changed because it’s an expression of divine will, and the slave’s suffering is justified by an afterlife. Literature written by the master, then, will portray philosophy, religion, history and human nature in fundamental conflict with his adversary, yet it is primarily this literature that constitutes the classics, and the culture that it founded gives rise to so much of Western literature. Accordingly, we take for granted these values, reading into them rather than around them. Enculturated in this mythos, we implicitly expect the world to work in this way, remaining ignorant of how these values affected other peoples and their cultures. That is, we may be aware of the impact of these values and norms, but not that they are merely one set, and therefore highly questionable.

It is our schemata, specifically, that conditions what we expect, and we tend to see what we expect to see. We expect to encounter further expressions of the norms absorbed and explicitly taught, often without even an awareness of alternatives. Formulaic fiction, for example, is easy to read and demands minimal effort because the majority hews to our expectations. By continually applying the same kind of tropes, the genre ossifies our schemata and therefore conditions us to predict what will happen next: we read, expecting the usual outcome. We are usually correct, and to the extent that we’re not, the text deliberately subverts the norm to engineer a similarly formulaic suspense. In her description of white critics ignorant of the racial context of the works they studied, Morrison explains an implication of this disposition: close, careful readers with gaping blind spots (Morrison 1994, 13). These critics didn’t expect “meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”, so they looked past tropes of darkness, Africanist “othering”, and the presence of minority characters. They were often proud that they hadn’t read any texts by African-American authors. Attributing this solely to racism, however, overlooks the broader context of schema-driven expectations—seeing what we expect to see is an intrinsic element of this kind of prejudice. We must be conscious of this insidious disposition because overcoming it takes effort. We must ask: what might other readers see that we have blinded ourselves to? To learn we must seek people who think differently to us, and listen.

Rorty described how novels can render visible the suffering of marginalised groups and the Other: the text’s illustration of what to look for, helps us come to expect it, and so perceive it more keenly in real life (Rorty 1989, 164). When we learn how other people experience our world we can identify opportunities to help them—directly or politically—or at least avoid contributing to their plight. Bayard urged us to engage in “detective criticism”—not merely observing a fictional world, but inhabiting it and imagining the consequences of specific interventions—to make us more attentive to scandals in the real world (Motte 2011, 273–4). In both of these instances, we must anticipate perceiving in books what would otherwise remain unnoticed, thereby cultivating broader expectations of our world. By allowing us to experience the world from other perspectives at a thoughtful and reflective pace, novels allow us to notice what our default expectations would have obscured, if we’re willing to read with this perspective. To produce such subtle demonstrations without resorting to overwrought didactic explanations, requires the kind of novelist who is generally only recognised by equally attentive critics. As if to prove our point, the novelist’s nuanced sketches are easily overlooked by characters in the fictional world, and then again by critics. This further stresses the importance of posterity in identifying these works: the pomp of the bold bestseller conceals what we need to see.

Diversity, however, isn’t the same as being politically correct, for that is also a narrowing stance. hooks argued that it is important to “read works by authors who may be racist, sexist, class-elitist, or homophobic” because openly addressing issues of diversity encourages us to interrogate our biases and think critically about how forces of discrimination dominate and intersect (hooks 2010, 106). Refusing to read such authors would have constituted “a tremendous loss” for her identity construction (p. 108). The “radical openness” she endorses is the uncomfortable, cognitively effortful stance we’ve been describing. To pursue diversity is to explore counterfactuals, read authors who whom you virulently disagree or whose perspectives shock you, experiment with literary forms, and read texts in different ways, employing different interpretative norms. Diverse reading keeps us nimble: grounded yet growing.

If we repeatedly read books which express the same negative prejudices, we risk adopting them and hardening our stereotyped expectations. Yet, Gadamer spoke of prejudices as pre-judgements: the necessary precursor to any judgement, with neutral connotations (2013, 272–273). Racism and sexism are prejudices, but so are the attitudes inculcated by a steady diet of police procedurals or detective fiction—prejudices need not be overtly hateful to be harmful.

Gadamer’s conception reminds us that prejudice pervades and precedes all human thought, including that of authors. Indeed, without schema-driven expectations, without any prejudices, we couldn’t have preferences, projects, develop expertise, or judge. Prejudice is ineluctable; yet, our reading can problematise or utilise it depending on our approach. It is convenient to say that we should read with diversity—broadly, considering a wide variety of perspectives to avoid hardening narrow expectations. And it’s absolutely true. But we can now see how this is impractical at the extremes. The maximally diverse reader would not be able to read multiple books on the same topic, by the same author, or perhaps in the same field. They’d read Persian poetry, aeronautical manuals, histories of snails, first-person accounts of philately, then collections of Roman rhetoric. They couldn’t engage their emotionality.

We will consider this dilemma between the dilettante and the aficionado in terms of literary selection and the attitude with which we read—the latter is discussed later in terms of the aporia of reading. When reading in niches involves reading many similar titles contiguously, it hardens our expectations because the same sort of predictions are continually proven correct. This is Quixote mistaking windmills for giants, and inns for castles—in his obsessive reading of chivalric fiction, this expectation was correct, so he continued to apply it in the world. By alternating between niche reading and that of unrelated titles, you can read deeply, then resurface—familiarising yourself with the lay of the land before burrowing back in. If the niche is ideological, the interleaving titles can be selected which question or contradict it, thus challenging or refining the prejudices it’s forming.

It has been suggested that rather than interleaving disparate titles, you should put down your books, go outside. The real world is presented as the antidote. Perhaps, but we rarely have radical experiences in the real-world that can fulfil this disconfirming function, and even during such a radical experience, we’d be likely to resort to default responses rather than learning in the moment. For real-life to fulfil the role of literature in this sense, the experience needs to be radical, relevantly contrastive, and reflected upon. Life can’t be a general solution to this problem; books, however, selected with care and read at a pace appropriate to our assimilating the experience, are well-suited.

When a niche isn’t ideological, but more formulaic, there’s neither an obvious threat nor an obvious counterpoint to read instead. Emma Bovary’s reading of sentimental romance novels led her to transcend her dull, prosaic reality by seeing herself as a heroine of a grand romance. She ran up huge debts to support the lifestyle portrayed by the fiction. She believed the insincere, clichéd, romantic proclamations of her paramour, Rodolphe. When her debts became due, when her lovers abandoned her, faced with disgrace and ruin, she took arsenic to escape. We can imagine how a frequent reader of such literature may avoid coming to Emma’s tragic end and live a productive life, yet still pursue, experience, and evaluate romantic relationships according to the genre’s unrealistic norms. The threat, then, is that you unconsciously internalise harmful norms: your real-life expectations gradually become contorted to a fictional model, against which they’ll ultimately be found wanting. When the fictional schema clashes with real world experiences, real life seems etiolated, dull, and unsatisfying, so the escapism of the genre becomes more attractive still.

If we choose to adopt a particular worldview, that is our right as autonomous human beings; our concern here is what happens when we absorb one without considering its implications. For niches of this kind, literary criticism and critical theory can act as a prophylactic by demystifying a genre or worldview. By explaining how the niche operates, its archetypes, its assumptions, and its implications, these works arm you. Whether you then choose not to read deeper into the niche, to read it more suspiciously, or engage knowingly, your decision is now conscious.

We read in a field of poles which pull us in different directions. Our task is to consciously assess our distance from them, continually adjusting our path. The self schema of others and ourselves needs to be similar enough to avoid alienation, but different enough that we constitute unique individuals. Our cultural schema needs to reflect those of others in our community so that we share the same reality, but different enough that we can creatively move this culture in new directions. A book should be close enough to our existing schemata that it’s understandable, but different enough that it’s interesting and productive. To achieve this balance we must alternate between diving downward, then returning to the heights to observe the whole field. A hawk wearing reading glasses.

Distance and diversity, then, become additional criteria for literary selection. We can now mount a more nuanced response to the question of what we should read by recommending the consideration of posterity, emotionality, diversity, and distance. With these principles in mind, how do we pick specific titles from our overflowing library of literature? How do we find books relevant to our projects, possessing emotional valence, and expressing concepts similar enough to our schemata to be understandable, yet dissimilar enough to be interesting and educational?

One approach is to turn to professional critics: the self-appointed representatives of an interpretative community. Standing between our schemata and books, critics explicitly argue for their own interpretations, promulgate exemplary applications of norms, and clarify them. They help answer the question: what specific titles should I read, or: should I read this?

Firstly we must defang them because professional critics gain too much power over us when we forget that they are also subjective readers whose judgements are relative to a community. The dogmatic critics who promoted the Canon and the aesthetic theory that explained good taste, had too much dominance, too much authority. They saw some absolute value, some universal theory, some blessed hierarchy of great books. Their ideal reader was, coincidentally, themselves. This is nonsense. The professional critic is an interpreter just like us.

Indeed, we’re all critics. For immature readers this likely consists of making qualitative statements of emotional response. Woolf describes this as “a demon in us who whispers , and we cannot silence him” (Woolf 1960, 243). A professional critic is expected to be on the other end of this continuum, possessing more developed literary or topic schemas, wider and more nuanced cultural literacy, greater fluency in making intertextual links, deeper background knowledge to evaluate the text’s claims, and greater consciousness of the relevant interpretative norms which enables them to evidence their conclusions. Criticism is justified judgement, with its utility depending heavily on the force of this justification. It can give language and argument to our reactions to texts, demonstrating by example how we can read and judge better.

Ideally, critics can save us the time reading shallow non-fiction by summarising its content concisely and with a more logical structure—in fact, they may provide a more efficient presentation of the original content. This works for bad books, books that should have been articles—the type Bacon urged us to “read by deputy” (Bacon 1985, 209). A book worth reading, however, won’t be exhausted or diminished by a review; it will beg to be read, and reread, and reward study. Critics help us glean the essentials from long-winded works, and can introduce us to those valued highest in their interpretative community. If we can separate this function from the notion that they present a single correct meaning of a text, or that their preferences necessarily have priority over ours, critics’ carping has its place.

Sometimes the criticism we need doesn’t exist, is of poor quality, or we need help refining broader questions of what we should read. When letter writing was commonplace, readers often turned to peers in such situations: exchanging book recommendations and criticism in this way. Correspondents influencing each other. Miller took this to the point of evangelism, and portrayed sharing a good book with others—physically or by recommendation—as an obligation of a reader (H. Miller 1969, 22–3). This is a viable and valuable approach to finding relevant, worthwhile books, but it’s unlikely that your correspondent network is diverse enough to rely on as your only source of recommendations. Peer recommendations in general, though, have great merit, especially from online reader communities that can effectively constitute a correspondent network of their own—but they can also act as echo chambers. We gain the benefit of peers’ assistance best when we treat such communities as places to visit rather than inhabit: sojourns not settlements.

We now have criteria for literary selection and guides towards books which meet these criteria. Pursuing diversity in reading means veering away from the popular and famed, however, so we may need to do without, or supplement, criticism and peers. For non-fiction, the bibliography of one book introduces titles in the same spirit, and when you have a topic in mind, librarians and their bibliographic databases are manna. Yet these resources produce lists, more relevant and personal than bestsellers and great books, certainly, but still at a remove from worthwhile reading material. For fiction, author interviews and the literary press can suggest books in a similar vein, and signals such as author reputation, publisher blurb, and reader reviews, can help, but ultimately they only guide. Nobody can tell you what to read: you need to begin the book and require it prove itself to you; if it comes up short, cast it aside.

For non-fiction, especially, evaluating a book can be made more efficient by performing “inspectional reading”: systematically skimming it, then if it still looks like a viable candidate, reading it superficially (Adler and Van Doren 1972, 32–36). Skimming is using the structure of a book—blurb, introduction, table of contents, first and last pages of chapters, conclusion, index, etc.—to determine its relevance in a brief time. Books surviving the skimming and self-examination stages can be examined superficially. This is a brisk reading, breezing past unfamiliar words or difficult sections, in order to answer the question “what is the book about?” (p. 18). Gibbon evaluated a new book by first clarifying to himself what he already understood about the topic such that he felt “qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock”—if an initial inspection finds it wanting in this regard, it can be set aside; otherwise, this process of self-examination prepares you for focusing on the interesting material (Gibbon 2006, 70). These pragmatic approaches help determine within a limited time whether a book warrants a careful, close reading.

We find books to read, then, by turning to other readers: consulting their lists, and listening to their accounts of how certain books affected them. We are unlikely to be affected in the same way because of the different schemata with which we approach the book, but we hope that ours overlaps with theirs sufficiently that their reasoning will resonate. We validate this hope by inspecting potential titles ourselves, comparing what we know, expect, and feel, to what the book’s macroscopic features suggest.

Having selected a piece of literature, and mindful of the need for diversity in reading, we remain confronted with Lem’s claim that if someone does read, they don’t understand. What stands between our schemata and a text that makes it more or less meaningful to us, and thus able to affect and stay with us? How do we interpret texts, and why might we fail?

Consider another work inspired by Don Quixote: Borges’ short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. It tells of a 20^th century Frenchman, Menard, who attempts to write—not reproduce, translate, or reinterpret—Cervantes’ novel verbatim. Borges’ narrator explains (Borges 1998, 91):

Modern readers encounter a great distance between themselves and Cervantes’ novel: they are unlikely to speak his Spanish, have not had the kinds of experiences or beliefs that he had or his original readers would have been able to relate to, and possess a great deal more knowledge about the world. As absurd as Menard’s plan is, it bears similarity to how some readers approach older texts. What is a better way to interpret over this chasm?

Menard “pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian” in an attempt to bridge the linguistic distance (ibid.). More commonly, even modern Spanish speakers read the work in translation. A translation is just another interpretation, though: to read a translation is to read a reading. A modern English translation of Don Quixote not only translates the text into current English but expresses a contemporary interpretation by an English speaker in a more felicitous fashion for modern ears. Far from the mechanical procedure that translations are sometimes imagined to be, they are actually creative acts that bring the text closer to us by inserting an intermediary: reducing one distance by introducing another.

The first English translation of the Odyssey, for example, was made in 16^th century England by Chapman. It’s just about understandable to a modern reader, but the latest translations feel closer to our time, a better fit with how we prefer to read. There have now been over 65 translations of this work in English alone, each constituting an interpretation. Perhaps their readers will stipulate to some facts, and the general plot, but the context of the translator, the word choice, the phrasing, and the rhythm of the text not only feels different for the reader but also draws their attention towards and away from different features. A simple example of this involves whether a translator consistently translates a particular word in the same way—to do so makes themes and intratextual allusions visible, but not to do so can allow the poem’s meter to be retained. Other examples abound.

Translation is just one factor in how different people interpret a single work. Hearing an epic poem performed by a travelling bard in a social setting is very different from reading it alone. Peoples that value warriors and heroic individualism, or believe in gods and the supernatural, or some combination, must find different meaning in the Homerica, and military veterans, world travellers, and pacifist feminists will likewise form very different impressions. When we interpret we consider the context of the text’s production, which will inevitably depend on our knowledge of history and our own community, with which we can’t help but compare. Each generation, each reader, comes to a text from a unique web of influences and backgrounds. The text will always be distant, and this distance greatly affects how we interpret.

In reading a famous text, especially, we come to it with ideas of what it’s supposed to mean, and implicitly compare it with later developments—hence Menard’s aim to forget European history. This is why when we read influential older books they can seem somewhat clichéd, despite being hugely original at the time of their initial publication: the works that they have influenced, have diluted and overused elements that were once original, tropifying them.

We can see that the reader’s context deeply conditions their interpretation, but may still dispute that their interpretative norms differ in this way, too. Despite the multifarious background knowledge we bring to a book, it may seem that we broadly judge it by the same, “common sense” standards. For instance, a widespread norm of interpretation is internal coherence: a text is expected not to logically contradict itself. We likewise assume that the author wrote to be understood (Abrams 1989, 126). Genre-specific norms also exist, and it’s due to the meta norms of our interpretative communities that certain types of interpretation seem more plausible. Yet, as we saw in our discussion of the Canon, we can’t separate norms from values. We naturally judge not only according to our knowledge of culture and related books, but also according to the standards that this reading taught us. Our traditions convey norms and their justifications. Norms and values are interconnected in our schemata with its other content, so we’re conditioned in what to expect, desire, and value by our experiences.

Traditions and translations pull us towards texts, while our chronological and cultural separation from the context of the text’s production, push us away. A text written in a foreign language is potentially alien to us—unhelpfully distant—but a translation doesn’t reduce this distance so much as it replaces it with another one. A modern text from your culture is closer to you, but does the familiarity lessen its potential impact—is distance troublesome per se? In general, then, we need to consider how we can deal with, and benefit from, these distances.

Gadamer suggested that the non-linguistic distances can be addressed with a “fusion of horizons”: those of the reader with those of the text (Gadamer 2013, 305). A horizon is “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (p. 345). We must seek to fuse because we can never inhabit the text’s horizon, as Menard suggests, nor could a text entirely inhabit our own. We can never read a text from outside all personal or cultural context: we can never achieve a neutral, “God’s-eye” view (McClean 2014, 97). Horizons are in motion as a result of new experiences, so this fusion is never completely achieved in practice, even for modern texts (Weinsheimer 1985, 177). Our horizons, our schemata, are perpetually changing, unique to us, and unable to be substituted or ignored.

In fusing horizons, the distance that we strive to reduce is between us and the text rather than the author. When Menard was attempting to “be Miguel de Cervantes”, he was trying to do the latter, but we can’t ever know the mind of the author, we can’t find some secret of the text in the author’s psyche. The text is autonomous from the author; as Barthes put it: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 1977, 148). Borges’ narrator demonstrates the fallacy of seeking authorial intent by providing scattered biographical data for Menard, showing that he wrote a toadying portrayal of a countess, and identifying “his resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held”—knowing about him would not illuminate his work, but in fact could distort its meaning (Borges 1998, 93).

We can deem Borges’ story satirical without his specific intent being known. To question the norm of authorial intent is not to deny that it was written by a person for a purpose, but that if we must infer this, we must do so purely from the text. We don’t need to be Borges to understand what the text does. In recent memory, Barthes’ position has been accepted by most interpretative communities: the norm of authorial intent has changed, or at least been questioned.

We are kept apart from a text by our schema-driven expectations: Gadamer’s pre-judgements (“prejudices”). In the act of fusion we need to make these prejudices vulnerable; not attempt to shed them—for we could not make any judgements without them—or assume they’re in error, but render them questionable. We can question the text’s prejudices because they’re not entirely ours; we can question our prejudices because the text confronts us with alternatives. Distance can be productive.

The distance between ourselves and our interpretative community is typically too small. We’re so embedded in an implicit community that questioning its norms and values doesn’t typically occur to the general reader. For particularly contemporary texts, there can also appear to be too little distance between their horizon and ours, with this perceived familiarity robbing us of critical perspective. Contrast reading the Odyssey with reading your autobiography. This is why posterity works in literary selection: too close to our eyes, a book blurs. A more modern work may require the reader to take a stance that intentionally increases the distance between themselves and the text so that the text’s assumptions become visible.

We can increase, or utilise, this distance by ascertaining whether we consciously subscribe to our community’s norms. We can become open to exploring how, say, a psychoanalytic or structuralist reading of our text would look. A feminist reading, for example, applies valuations and norms to reveal the once hidden distance between women and literature which tended to exclude or minimise their presence. We can choose to inhabit different communities by reading their criticism and valued authors, and engaging with them. We can engage because communities are composed of people with whom we can discuss our interpretations, clarify our understanding, and improve theirs. This social dimension spans book clubs, great books programs, seminars, journals, and online discussion groups. It’s how authors, critics, and readers come together to hash out their approach, to read in community.

This is the process by which textual interpretation is adjudicated. The typical piece of genre fiction yields an uncontroversial meaning to the solitary reader applying conventional norms; direct contact with the community is unnecessary because the reader has internalised its principles. When a text subverts these norms, couches key passages in ambiguity, or is particularly challenging, the community’s criticism can be consulted for guidance. When criticism is insufficient or lacking, community consensus can be sought. This does not imply that the community need ascribe a singular meaning to a text, but rather that it agrees on certain specific interpretations being reasonable.

When a community can’t reach consensus, or when certain interpretations are seen as particularly contradictory or controversial, new norms may be established or communities may schism. Indeed, masterpieces of literature often earn their reputation because they work on communities in this way. Interpretative communities also arise from questions coming from outside the text—be they socio-economic changes, cultural attitudes shifting, or criticism that proposes a different way of reading. Just as in reading we attempt to reduce distance through fusion of horizons, interpretative communities promote techniques for making this distance productive. Menard’s approach proposes how texts can be reanimated by questioning certain norms (p. 95):

Céline was a celebrated novelist turned virulent antisemite; to attribute the Christian devotional work, The Imitation of Christ, to him is to question the norms of authorial intent and separating artist from work. The technique Borges is describing here involves, in effect, alternative rules of interpretation: the makings of an interpretative community. By changing how works are judged and ordered chronologically, new values are created. The very fact that Don Quixote was to be written by a 20^th century Frenchman, as opposed to the 17^th century Spaniard, Cervantes, alters the context, and thus the timeline, of literature. However, given that his text would have been identical to Cervantes’, the actual reproduction is irrelevant: the idea of the contextual shift is itself productive.

Awareness that norms can change, and are changing, demonstrates the contingency of critical judgements and the inanity of dogmatism. Interpretative practices evolve, and as members of interpretative communities, as readers and writers, we all have a role in shaping their norms and values, by suggesting our own and endorsing others’. Woolf believed that “we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work” (Woolf 1960, 244).

An interpretative community is not an egalitarian institution, however. Valued authors and critics have an outsize influence on its judgements and norms, as do the institutions of which they are often a part. The judgement of a community won’t reflect all marginalised voices, and won’t be based purely on rational argument. This is the situation for any human institution, of course, but readers can help remedy it by debating controversial decisions or domineering members while amplifying marginalised members, questioning historical and traditional biases, being open to schisms and joining other communities, and being aware that communities exist by the consent of their members.

hooks describes her students who are uncomfortable reading books by people unlike them—women who behave as if they can “only read women”, black people, black writers, or white students who believe that they “can only identify with a white writer” (McLeod 1998). We can share hooks’ discomfort with her students discomfort in the context of our diversity discussion alone, but can also see these attitudes as potentially constitutive of interpretative communities, whose scale of values would exclude many books generally deemed classics. Perhaps this represents an over-correction from the centuries of teaching such a homogeneous, unrepresentative canon, but to reject these concerns as ridiculous is to repeat the mistakes of the dogmatic canonisers. Interpretative communities are always threatening to split apart, and sometimes this is necessary, but we can mitigate against it by seriously addressing members’ concerns with both compromise and argument.

That interpretation functions in this way troubles those who fear a world where anything goes, nothing is permanent, and meaning is in flux. Cultural change is chaotic in the moment, and can seem jarring, but cultures have always evolved against the backdrop of opposed, interacting, communities. We see this on the micro-level with how our own schemata change as we have new experiences: the world changes us, we change the world. Meaning and norms have always evolved this way, yet we are still able to make sense of ancient texts such as Homer’s because some norms remain stable in major interpretative communities. Literary meaning is not, and is not becoming, hyper-relativist or arbitrary. Communities constrain meaning.

The meaning of a text is not fixed in time and varies across community; but it doesn’t mean whatever you want it to mean. Why shouldn’t it? For an autonomous, modern, educated reader, why can’t Don Quixote be a meditation on the Peloponnesian war, or Madame Bovary predict the invention of the Internet? The meaning of a book, it turns out, is what other people think is reasonable. Idiosyncratic readings can be productive for creative projects, but don’t constitute cultural currency in themselves; the price of a radical reading is persuading others of your interpretation. It needs to be sufficiently novel so as not to simply satisfy existing norms, but sufficiently familiar to be understandable to the community. It can be expressed, discussed, and made public; understood by others because it relies on common standards. However, communities cohere because questioning and subverting norms is an unsettling, potentially alienating process: radical interpretations are not purely intellectual exercises in persuasion or argumentation. The cost of minting currency also constrains meaning.

Some of the most culturally significant texts—spiritual and esoteric works, foundational myths, fables, etc.—have a general property of eluding conclusive, singular interpretations. Interpretation is required for any text, but with this sort of allegorical work, personal evaluation is demanded. The history of Christianity describes in essence a large-scale project of interpreting an allegorical text, with schisms occurring according to conflicting readings. Each denomination is an interpretive community with its own norms, attempting to constrain interpretation in different ways. For most allegorical texts, such schisms are rare: we tend to allow the community to determine a general interpretation while leaving certain facets contested along reasonable lines.

To speak allegorically or proverbially is to attempt to express personal wisdom, but wisdom cannot be expressed directly because it comprises an entanglement of our personal experiences and knowledge; we can’t directly export elements of our schema for others to import. Quixote’s squire was illiterate, and often talked by stringing together proverbs: they provided the building blocks of his speech. Others’ phrasings and metaphors gave him the words to express himself. People exchange the gnomic content of proverbs, and the context of this exchange colours, but does not dictate, how their interlocutors will understand their meaning. This allows for an abstraction between information and meaning that makes principles both communicable and contextually relevant. Constrained ambiguity of this sort makes interpretations both understandable to a community, but also personal. Authors of such sayings consciously leave a gap between their words and the meaning a reader would be expected to derive, because by forcing the reader to form their own judgement it becomes more meaningful and memorable for that person. To the extent that the reader credits themselves with the insight, the more resonant it seems to their situation: when we create something, when we feel in possession of it, it integrates more strongly into our self-schema. When derived across interpretative gulfs, ideas become more interesting, meaningful, and memorable because they are ours.

Wilde advised us to reject works that “have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile”, to cast aside dull texts that offer obvious, unambiguous meanings, in favour of those which “possess the subtle quality of suggestion” (Wilde 1997, 73–75). A common trait of works which are praised and reread by the thinkers we profile is that they provide this interpretive freedom by insisting on their distance from the reader. Nietzsche, Emerson, and Montaigne, among others, exemplified this approach by reading allegorical, wisdom literature, reflecting on often aphoristic remarks, then using the wisdom they derived to produce their own work, which was often similarly permissive of multiple interpretations.

Wilde could take this position because he rejected “all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything” (Wilde 1968, 3). This was conducive to his creative project, but readers who do want to read such titles are faced with the matter of some texts being obscure or misleading, not to permit interpretative freedom, but because they’re playful, malicious, or simply incompetent. When such tactics are suspected, a reader has recourse to community discussion—even if we believe we have successfully interpreted a text, others’ perspectives can reveal problematic interpretative gulfs. We avoid being hoodwinked by learning from the community a sceptical form of interpretation that reveals such trickery. This is similar to the prophylactic function of criticism mentioned previously, but is now expanded into a defence against intentionally misleading works. Masters of hucksterism, sophistry, and bad faith argumentation can be made to serve us as deconstructed demonstrations of the tools of pernicious persuasion.

In Menard’s Quixote, the baroness of Bacourt sees the influence of Nietzsche because in interpretation we combine what we read with what we’ve read—with our schemata (Borges 1998, 93). This making of meaning is both personal and consensus-based, free without being arbitrary. Awareness that we have partial control over interpretative norms, some of which are in flux, affords us creative possibilities while encouraging intellectual humility and debate. We inherit norms through tradition, and negotiate them with an interpretative community, then, but how do we apply them to specific texts?

Ricoeur proposed that as we read, we hypothesise how the text will develop based on our expectations, let the text confirm or disconfirm us, and all the while make additional hypotheses (Ricoeur 1976, 76–9). We are driven by our schemata to pose questions whose answers update our schemata, in a continual loop. The questions are almost always unconscious. Reading around a hermeneutical circle involves circular movements within the text: moving between its parts, its whole, and our schemata, repeatedly, and often effortlessly.

When you consider a book at the level of word and sentence, and how you learned to read, you see how this process works. You have a highly developed schema of how words and sentences are constructed, what words sensibly follow others, and this all happens entirely by habit. You’re made aware of this process only when it fails: when an unexpected word or sentence construction is encountered.

Conceptually, the same process occurs when reading our n^th detective novel. We are prepared by our prior experience and the genre to ask certain questions regarding the criminal’s motivations, the detective’s methodology, what the clues mean, etc. We ask and answer these questions automatically because this is how our schemata prepare us. Before reading a piece of formulaic genre fiction you know a great deal of the book’s structure, archetypes, expected twists, and topics that will and won’t be broached, so the guesses you make are unconscious and tend to be correct. This process hardens your schema, improving your ability to interpret similar novels. We begin reading with generic questions, possibly based on our preconceptions of what the book is about, or its genre, then revise and clarify these questions as we receive more information.

This almost programmatic, unconscious questioning allows us to follow simple plots. When we read in this way, we’re led around the well-trodden grooves of our schemata. The schema-driven expectations that condition low-level interpretation lead to books feeling easy to read but neither exciting nor interesting. They feel easy because it takes little cognitive effort to merely confirm prejudices—it can even feel lightly comfortable to be right. Books read this way may still create occasional suspense and elicit weak emotional reactions, but don’t engage us. If we merely receive a text by relying on habit, we don’t encounter anything new, worth remembering or considering. We can’t remember what we don’t see, and we don’t see what we don’t look for.

Sometimes, however, we are confused, surprised, moved, or intrigued by a text, so our questions become explicit. Either our stereotyped questions don’t help, or we’re engaged enough to pose our own. Indeed, a function of an interpretative community, qua community, is helping us ask better questions of the text and evaluate its answers. Worthwhile books encourage and reward this questioning by affecting us emotionally and intellectually, contributing to our learning from literature. This is how we make our prejudices vulnerable, how we allow texts to change us, to move beyond following the plot or following an exposition. To profit from a book, we must consciously ask something of it.

Questioning drives reading by focusing our attention on aspects of the text that interest us, and then encouraging us to explore them in greater depth. When we’re questioning, our attention is focused because we’re searching for the answers. We’re reading certain parts more carefully, and others more briskly. For weightier books, this single-minded approach, where some material isn’t fully attended to, is necessary to avoid being overwhelmed. Classics reward rereading in this spirit: subsequent readings can pose different questions, so focus on different aspects of the text.

We question the text and, as our discussion of prejudices revealed, the text questions us. Following Gadamer and Ricoeur, we can say that to interpret a text is to be in a dialogue with it, and that we’re drawn into this conversation when the text says something that interests us: suggesting a matter of mutual concern. We come to see the text not as a series of assertions or pronouncements, but as possible answers to questions that we’re motivated to ask. We understand a question by knowing why it was asked, and actually asking it ourselves. To understand a text, then, we must begin by understanding the question to which it was an answer in its historical horizon. When we ask this question, we understand that there are other possible answers than those provided by the text, opening up the conversation in which we’re engaged. That is, we see the question as open; if it were closed, and the text provided a definitive answer, true for all time, there is no conversation to be had. When the question is open, the text is open to our contributions, and the question is asked of us. We do not aim to supply definitive answers, though, but more questions—keeping the conversation going. Interpretation is an ongoing process. One of the ways that the text suggests questions for us is by what it takes for granted, and as this is a conversation, it questions what we take for granted, too. Hence, the conversation with a text is never concluded: new questions always arise.

Making notes of open questions and either the answers gleaned from the text, or the text’s failure to adequately resolve them, helps structure our reading, direct our attention, and provide prompts for future reading. By asking relevant and interesting questions, we bring our schemata to mind, prime associated concepts, and test them against the text. This is a creative process that encourages us to form new connections between concepts precisely because we don’t rely on the expected connections: we gain the freedom of switching from automatic to manual mode. We feel the buzz of insight generated by linking seemingly disparate notions.

Questioning is a critical stance. Without it, if we do remember anything from the text, it’s unthinkingly assimilated into an existing schema. Texts that are worthy of your time are strengthened by your questioning: they become more meaningful the more critical that you are. A critical stance is a search for truth. We ask: is what this book’s saying true? We’re obligated to evaluate the answers a text yields in order to understand them. If we haven’t understood them, we are unable to learn from them because we want to avoid learning what is false.

True is an epithet we apply to what is useful to believe. Much of what we deem true arises from us internalising the consensus of our communities in our schemata, and here truth finds its force, but what’s true for a community begins with the independent beliefs of its members. These arise through reflection and experience. Consensus can occur somewhat organically, with the successful application of new ideas proving their utility, but serious shifts are controversial so require debate: different people have different, communicable beliefs of which they seek to persuade others. Debate is a perpetual feature of a community because its truth is what it finds useful, and what is useful changes as the community and its environment changes. Through critical engagement with literature we can gauge and challenge consensus, testing and refining our schemata so that it reflects what is useful and true.

Books give us new language to do this, proposing re-descriptions of our world that influence our understanding of it, sometimes to the extent that we accept them as true. Rorty talked of “old metaphors…constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors” (Rorty 1989, 7, 16). What is now true became true as people discussed and applied it, much like how interpretative communities determine meaning. Consensus is how mere metaphors mutate into what we all know.

Reaching consensus not only creates new truth, but also may invalidate old truth: the new metaphor, the new description, meets current needs better than the old, so the new becomes true, and the old is demoted. What do we do with new metaphors we encounter which seem useful, yet have been neither discredited nor adopted? Readers with the requisite background knowledge can evaluate them, and discuss amongst themselves the potential for their being true; other readers benefit from posterity guiding their literary selection. In either case, we can arrest our learning by deeming a new idea true or false too soon. There is more strength in holding such an idea in an open hand than in a clenched fist.

The history of science illustrates this process of metaphors becoming true. Books are published proposing new descriptions of the world, they’re understood by only a few, the new description spreads to the wider community, a portion of which rejects the new description in favour of the old, and eventually the description spreads to other communities. Of course, this triumph is the exception; most descriptions of this sort remain between the covers, not gaining our consent to diffuse into our cultural schema. To speak of even scientific truth, then, is to omit the caveat “according to current consensus”.

Collingwood described the information in textbooks as “that putrefying corpse of historical thought” because they obscured the process by which current consensus had arisen, erasing its historicity (Collingwood 1939, 75). Primary literature reveals that “the natural sciences have a history of their own, and that the doctrines they teach on any given subject, at any given time, have been reached not by some discoverer penetrating to the truth after ages of error, but by the gradual modification of doctrines previously held” (p. 2). This gradual modification isn’t a refinement towards perfect truth: we’re always in error, just in different ways to our ancestors. We gain much needed intellectual humility by recognising that the ways peoples have been so wrong about their world is a consequence of how knowledge production works. It’s not an indicator that our ancestors were stupid and that truth progresses from philistines to oh-so-smart moderns, but a reminder that our understanding is always in a Heraclitean flux. The best we can do is what they did—learn from past errors, attempt to form consensus—and exercise restraint when professing certainty over current consensus.

All truth works in this way. Lowell asks: “Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln?” (Lowell 1887, 111). We know that Hamlet is not a real person, yet he exists by consensus because his character is so useful for folk psychology. We can discuss Hamlet as an individual because Shakespeare’s creation is part of our cultural schema, and generations of discussion about him have reified his existence. Even clearly fictional falsehoods become real through their use, and vice versa. For example, consider: humors, Hamlet, quarks, and Quixote.

Quixote isn’t real in the same way a quark is because truth is relative to communities and genres. Scientific truth is a standard of truth that a community associates with particular genres, which then refine it further; other types of writing have different notions of what’s true and how to prove it. The truth of a scholarly work depends on how the field of knowledge that it represents views standards of proof, the properties it expects arguments to satisfy, and the type of claims it permits. Fictional truth, as Lowell suggested, isn’t the misnomer it appears to be, and may involve norms such as believability of character psychology, the internal coherence of the metaphysics of its universe and the psychology of its inhabitants, and, for some genres, that it bears a particular relation to the real world. Spiritual communities employ a standard of truth involving coherence with tradition, resonance with the reader’s experience, and the pedigree of the author. Anchoring truth to community and genre is important when it has a tendency to escape these bounds to feign universality or assert its emancipation from standards of evaluation. We can choose, therefore, the community within which to evaluate a book.

By making this explicit we can avoid misinterpreting pseudo-scientific claims, conflating a historical novel with a history of the time period, or, in general, devaluing a text by overlooking what it does say in favour of what we think it should say. A book isn’t wrong, per se, if it makes claims counter to the consensus of other communities. It can provide a beautiful, poetic allegory of an aspect of life which we find both aesthetically pleasing and useful for our thinking, yet is entirely untrue according to modern scientific consensus. The problem arises when we forget what our judgement is relative to: any book is nonsense if evaluated by inappropriate standards.

Consider the works of Freud. They provided hugely influential insights and concepts for thinking about our behaviour, and an intriguing raft of claims that were either disproven or resisted any kind of proof. Given our modern understanding of truth, it is unhelpful to classify his books as right or wrong. Instead, they can be viewed through different lenses: psychology credits them with some useful notions but discredits many of their specific mechanisms; psychoanalysis promotes their spirit in an almost allegorical way; and historians of intellectual thought trace how Freud’s core ideas have influenced subsequent generations.

Human behaviour can be explained on genetic, neurological, cognitive, environmental, and cultural levels. Each explanation may be true by the standards of its field and accord entirely with consensus, but not in itself give us general answers. If even scientific truth is “according to current consensus” and bracketed by the domain, it can’t directly resolve our real concerns because they aren’t relative to specific disciplines. For any important topic there are multiple perspectives on it, each true in their own way, and so a critical stance encompasses both individual books and their combination. We read with diversity to compare the consensuses of various communities in order to find human truth.

We can speak of science in terms of consensus precisely because scientific claims can be falsified—they permit disproof (Popper 2005, 18–21). Non-fiction genres that occupy the ground between imaginative fiction and science often make non-falsifiable claims. This is perfectly fine as long as this distinction is understood (p. 18). Freud attacked his critics by accusing them of “repression”—his concept—which being non-falsifiable could not be refuted. He wanted his propositions to receive the respectability, and have the power, of scientific claims without formulating them according to scientific standards. When we evaluate claims, then, we must ask what it would mean to show them incorrect—if they’re too vague or broad to allow for such a hypothesis to be formulated, we can deem them unscientific, and so judge them from within more appropriate communities.

Some works exploit this situation by employing the language and metaphors of science to make non-falsifiable claims appear veridical by encouraging the reader to misapply interpretative standards. In this way, a book can request to be evaluated in the context of the self-help genre, say, inviting the reader to lower their guard, but then present claims with the imprimatur of scientific rigour.

Others create the illusion of conveying wisdom, yet leave you unable to specify what you’ve actually learned. Certain spiritual, self-help, and ideological titles manipulate you into feeling smarter by tickling your ego and making gnomic statements in this way. They hew to our expectations of how wisdom is expressed, pleasantly ossifying our schemas without challenging them. The issue isn’t that they’re wrong, or merely non-falsifiable, but that they create the impression of truth while being formless. This is pernicious because the reader can feel like they’re growing, yet be enveloped in a fog. For a proposition to be a candidate for community consensus it needs to be communicable—if you’re unable to even communicate a concept to yourself in your own, specific terms, it constitutes at best an affective mental state.

Evaluating the truth of what we read means attending to our beliefs—what feels useful—while testing them against the consensus of multiple communities, and reaching tentative judgements. It requires consciousness of how truth is created and maintained so as to avoid descents into dogmatism. Prefer to be all-but certain, leaving open the possibility that you’re not entirely correct. This ephectic position makes you more intellectually humble, and thus a more virtuous person, but also a more curious, critical reader.

Yet, if reading critically requires conscious mental effort, somebody reading for relaxation or escape may see it as inimical to their goal. They don’t wish to learn or grow, just enjoy the experience; an experience ruined by attempting to step back from the text. This is the fallacy that relaxation requires mindless, uncomplicated, familiar activity—we enjoy being distracted without having to think. The mere fact that reading in this way is valued for sending the reader to sleep demonstrates that it’s actually boring the reader. Our minds shift to daydreams in an attempt to find a task worthy of our immense cognitive faculties that we’re attempting to squander. When our attention isn’t engaged, our minds wander and we feel distracted or bored. The lightest fiction attempts to peg the level of intellectual engagement required only slightly above this boredom threshold. It’s faintly pleasant to have our expectations borne out, our hypotheses proven, but only up to a point: there can be no personal or intellectual growth, or even sustained excitement in mere eye exercise. Even relaxation requires a text that challenges and a reader who strives to meet that challenge.

It is nevertheless true that while taking a critical stance we can’t concurrently become enchanted by the text. Indeed, Quixote’s utter lack of criticality made him superb at entering the fictional world. J.H Miller describes an “aporia of reading” in this regard, and many other thinkers raise similar concerns around the issue of reading speed (J. H. Miller 2002, 118–121). This is not the discredited notion of speed reading, but rather the paradox that we need to read fast and slow (allegro and lento) simultaneously to become engrossed in the fictional world or metaphysical context, yet also look askance: entering into the world of the text and standing back to examine it more critically.

Morrison saw the reader as an artist, combining “willing acceptance coupled with intense inquiry”, simultaneously surrendering and remaining attentive, to the text (Morrison 2006). Nabokov urged that we “remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece” (Nabokov 1980, 4). Henry Miller read with “the right and the left eye” (H. Miller 1969, 36). Wolf learned to festina lente (“hurry slowly”): “You read quickly (festina), till you are conscious (lente) of the thoughts to comprehend, the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember, and, when fortunate, the insights to unfold” (Wolf 2018, 193). To read fiction for Eco was to suspend both belief and disbelief (Eco 2014a, 260). The aporia of reading is that “you must read in both ways at once, impossibly” (J. H. Miller 2002, 159).

We question the text by contemplating how the part connects with the whole, what is being left unsaid, what assumptions are in play, and what is happening behind the scenes. We also question ourselves in the lento mode of reading by engaging in metacognition: how are we thinking about, responding to, and learning from, the material? By monitoring where our minds flit, how our emotional state alters our mood, and how our attention is attracted and repelled, we begin to understand what the book does to us, and what strategies for concentrating on and being changed by a text are personally effective. We must read ourselves while reading others.

Without allegro reading, however, we can’t fully enter into the book’s context. This can be seen in the suspension of disbelief necessary to explore a fictional world, but is no less important when reading title from the humanities. In the latter case, we must maintain a great deal of context given the author’s previous claims and their implications, so as to follow the arguments as they unfurl. Stepping back from the text to read lento, distracts us from this context, yet without it we’re merely enchanted, led by the nose. We’re not fusing horizons, we’re vanishing into the text.

We read lento, seek truth, in order to learn from the text. Learning is the modification of our schemata to incorporate new, true knowledge that can be recalled at a later date in a useful manner. It is the means by which a book continues to influence us after we have read it, via facts, specific impressions, and insights. Purely allegro reading makes this difficult because we finish the book with perhaps an emotional reaction, and rough recollections of some plot points, concepts, or character names. Maybe. In any case, these memories are likely fleeting. This is unfortunate because memories of books allow us to make intertextual links that enrich our literary enjoyment, provide insights into lives, reveal the workings of our world, and fuel our creativity. For Sontag, reading is “the passport to enter a larger life”, for hooks, “part of the path to communion and community”, for Sedgwick, a way of reparatively exploring cultural-historical counterfactuals (McLeod 1998; Sedgwick 2003, 146–150; Sontag 2007, 209). Rorty saw literature as providing us new “moral vocabularies” that allow us to see “more and more traditional differences… as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation”—a moral education (1989, 192).

Texts can also teach us what interests us, what kind of connections between concepts bring us pleasure and invite intrigue, to the extent we engage in metacognition. That is, it’s possible to be unaware of what texts do to us, but if we listen to our reactions, they clarify ourselves to ourselves, and guide our learning.

We experience pleasure in finding things out, learn and remember what interests us, and active questioning focuses our attention on this material. Quixote developed an encyclopedic memory of the world of chivalry not by explicitly studying his novels but because each one reinforced the other and he was passionately interested, personally invested in them. However, in scholarly and business contexts when the selection of material is outside of our control, and when we encounter tedious sections of reading material we have chosen, we tend to resign ourselves to learning without interest. This is how we ended up with rote memorisation, cramming, and passing over the text without thought—in the absence of interest we substituted brute force.

If we lack interest in what we wish to learn, we need to cultivate curiosity by asking different questions which are relevant to the text but that also animate us: we need to find an angle from which it can be interrogated. If the questions arise from a subjective angle they allow the emotional resonance of a story or argument to connect with our personal experiences, forging memories that are not just strong, but deeply meaningful. This is the thread that connects different forms of learning from texts: by taking the perspective of others, by contemplating ourselves in different contexts, by paying attention to what excites us, we encounter new material in a state receptive to learning.

Our questions help reduce the distance between our schemata and the text by relating what we know to what we read, but for learning to be possible this gap must be appropriate. Too little distance and there’s little to learn; too much distance and we lack the pre-existing mental concepts to connect to the new. This is most obvious when we have no pretence of comprehending a particular text, e.g. one written in an alien language, highly advanced mathematical literature, abstruse philosophy. This isn’t a problem because we recognise that the text is too challenging, so don’t even attempt comprehension let alone interpretation. The difficulty arises when we misunderstand the distance between our schemata and text.

Our schemata develop organically, through experience, cultural literacy, and formal education. Pedagogy tends to carefully modulate the degree of challenge the material being taught poses by a process of gradation, but outside of higher education, we lack this formalism. This leads us to undertake texts which bore us because they pose no challenge, or frustrate us because we unknowingly lack sufficient background knowledge. It threatens self-directed study and leaves us vulnerable to charlatans and crackpots. To remember what we read we must feel that we understand it, we must be able to sufficiently connect it to our existing knowledge. Our task, then, is to control the distance between our schemata and the text in such a way that it’s interesting and productive.

In doing this, we seek to avoid what Adler described as the “vice of verbalism”: being able to parrot what we read without connecting it to existing knowledge (Adler and Van Doren 1972, 128). We can moderate our distance from a text by expressing the concepts we read about in our own words and generating concrete examples of them. This brings the distant text closer to our schemas in a personal way. By expressing an idea using concepts and language more familiar to us, it becomes easier to assimilate, and gains more connections to our existing knowledge. However, if our re-phrasing closes too large of a gap, our conclusion is reductive: we may have augmented our knowledge, but haven’t really understood the text—it’s too distant from us. This scenario implies that the text poses too great a challenge.

Nietzsche’s approach to texts exemplified a lento reading whereby he read wisdom literature, coined aphorisms by meditating on his reading, then remembered those. He read with sufficient critical attention to not only understand the text, but creatively interpret the sentiment in a way that interested and animated him. He understood and made memorable his reading.

Learning, then, involves understanding and memory, and the former doesn’t guarantee the latter. Bayard suggested that we forget the majority of what we read (Bayard 2007, 47–8). This takes the form of literally not remembering that we’ve read a particular book, retaining a hazy memory of its outline, forming incorrect beliefs, or believing that we remember it only to find when we try to explain it to somebody else that we’re sorely mistaken. Until we test our recall, we overvalue it.

When recalling a book, we tend to rely on event or role schemas to fill the gaps in our memory and make the recollections cohere. So, a regular reader of detective novels may indeed be able to describe a particular book with reasonable accuracy because they remember a few plot points, and integrate them into their detective novel schema. This becomes confidently incorrect when the schema is subverted by the text. When we read without trying to remember, what we do recall will be scattered and rarely what we wish we’d remembered. We don’t know what we know until we try to recall it.

This can feel frustrating and we may blame our memories, but forgetting is adaptive. Metaphors of our brains as video recorders and computer disks are radically unhelpful because they cause forgetfulness to seem like a bug, like a shortcoming. Cognitive activity always involves trade-offs between mental effort, utility, and flexibility. It’s necessary to forget in order to generalise, otherwise important themes and ideas would become obscured by all the extraneous information the text included. We need to prune irrelevant connections between mental concepts so that we can creatively produce our own. If a reference to a book we read churned up memories of its entire contents we’d be overwhelmed, drowned in detail.

Another reason that we forget so much of what we read is because it doesn’t seem worth remembering. Photographic memory is a myth, but if we could recall a novel in this way, what would we do with all of that information? It may have been relevant to our comprehension as we were reading, but recalling it years later is of no use. Put another way, even if we had remembered it, the fact that we wouldn’t have had recourse to recall it would lead to our forgetting it through disuse. We often don’t remember because we don’t pay attention, and we don’t pay attention to material which doesn’t seem sufficiently relevant to our interests. The problem here then isn’t forgetting per se, but ensuring that our idea of what’s worth remembering tallies with that of our reading brain.

Memorising a whole book is neither practical nor desirable. Students may object that being able to memorise a textbook would indeed be a wonderful ability, but this exposes another misconception about memory. Even if we were capable of memorising a book, it would exist as an opaque blob in our minds. It would have few if any connections to our schemata. Not only do we fail to understand it, we’re also liable to forget it quickly. We could perhaps recite the text in memory until we arrive at section relevant to an examination question, but few serious exams reward mere feats of memory.

We can memorise a passage on a topic about which we know nothing in a language which we don’t speak. But what’s the point? Bacon saw memorising shorter passages as beneficial for rhetorical reasons (Bacon 1985, 209). Carroll and some of his peers had therapeutic motivations: reciting inspiring, reverent, wise remarks would help get them through tough times when the book was unavailable (Wakely-Mulroney, 194–5). In this context, Carroll used his memory for something it’s poor at: he tried to remember not the concepts, spirit, or certain expressions from a text, but to inscribe verbatim lines on his mind. This fell out of favour among educationists because they realised that, while it may be impressive for a child to recite a famous poem, say, it wasn’t actually teaching them anything.

Even if we perfectly understand the text and remember it, we may still fall short of learning what is true if the text is wrong or our schemata are deficient. We have discussed the first case in terms of literary selection and critical reading—avoiding poor books and reading lento to notice falsities. The second case is hinted at by our discussion of how schemas tend to grow organically. When they develop in combination with practical applications and a diverse range of reading, this may be adequate, but what are the consequences of trying to reduce the distance between a worthwhile text and a distorted schema?

We often feel that we understand novels because they’re founded on our highly-developed schema of folk psychology, which we form from fiction and our lifetime of experience with other people. We intuitively grasp how people act, how their behaviour affects them, and can take their perspectives. For other genres, however, this foundational schema may be lacking or absent. We’ve mentioned extremes like a non-mathematician reading advanced mathematical texts, but often the distinction is more subtle. We already know something about the topic we’re reading about, but not the extent and accuracy of that knowledge.

Accordingly, in order to learn from non-fiction, Bain suggested that we need to form a firm, consensus-based topic schema, by beginning study with a “textbook-in-chief”. This need not be a textbook, per se, but a book with similar properties: a methodical structure, up-to-date, relatively comprehensive without being exhaustive, offering memorable and explanatory illustrations of concepts, and representing the prevailing view of the topic rather than the author’s idiosyncrasies. The notion that we should begin studying a topic with a book that has certain features is useful, but having discussed truth and Collingwood’s objection to textbooks, we can tweak Bain’s requirements.

Our textbook-in-chief isn’t even ostensibly authoritative because, as we have seen, no book can be; it should be the beginning of a program of diverse reading. It’s an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the domain, that nevertheless promises to grow outdated. It addresses Collingwood’s objection by presenting the history of the relevant ideas and their genealogy. The key controversies and debates are described, along with how the methodology has evolved. By directing the reader to many other texts in the domain, it decentralises its own authority and aids in literary selection. It possesses meta-critical self-awareness in acknowledging its own limitations and what it consciously omits, both as a matter of intellectual honesty, but also as an example of how to read other texts critically. This prepares the reader to understand that the field is dynamic and contested, not a monolithic body of knowledge transmitted by tradition—showing that knowledge is constructed through dialogue and disagreement.

Our talk of study and learning in this context does not imply anything formal or scholarly, simply the attitude of a serious person towards knowledge. Say that you’re interested in the theory of evolution—not in an academic sense, just curious. A modern polemic on how evolution isn’t true has just been published, and is entertaining to read; thought-provoking, perhaps. But without a firm, consensus-based schema, you can’t judge it; or, specifically, you can’t evaluate its scientific truth. By contrast, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a classic of science, of great historical interest, but hopelessly outdated in ways that won’t be obvious without the appropriate background.

Both of these books may be worth reading, but before you do so, you should build a foundation. We attempt to either assimilate new knowledge into existing schemas or accommodate it by forming new schemas, so when you have a misguided schema, you’ll contort relevant information into it, or discard it entirely because it fails to cohere. Accordingly, if we begin with the polemic, the popular iconoclast, a critique of the orthodoxy, or an overview shorn of all nuance, we risk building a distorted view of the topic that may not be apparent for quite some time.

We can see this idea at work in Planck’s observation that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (Planck 1949, 33–34). A specialist with expertise forms a dense schema around foundations thought to be solid at the start of their study, but when these foundations begin to be questioned and dismantled by others, the individual is unable and unwilling to uproot their entire model, so dogmatically defends it until their death. They interpret threats to their foundations as personal attacks. It is their successors, unburdened by this lifetime investment in outmodded concepts, who can innovate. Our consideration of diversity and truth suggest attitudes that can resist this fate: we delay becoming dinosaurs by beginning from a firm footing, and walking with cautious steps in a variety of directions. Forming convictions, but treating them as hypotheses to be disproved.

The textbook-in-chief, then, provides a caveat to Johnson’s notion of pleasure driving what to read. Johnson was accused of desultory reading, a bugbear of his peers, but we can now see that when you develop taste and read on topics that you have a consensus-based schema for, your reading can be freer, more whimsical, if you choose.

We see here a solution to the dilemma of wanting both the new and the true — if we wish to explore the controversial and latest works in a field, we must do so from a position that allows us to consider their claims. The textbook-in-chief represents a principle for reading non-fiction. It’s an antidote to being misinformed by the popular, easy read on political topics, health and nutrition, personal finance, scientific advances, etc.

Bringing material from books closer to firm topic schemata helps us understand what we read, but it’s still subject to forgetting. For a book to have a more permanent effect on us, this understanding needs integration into our long-term memory. It is necessary to express a text’s contents in our own words on some permanent media.

Generic note taking, effectively rewriting a book in summary form, may be helpful for a textbook-in-chief, but is not how most people want to read. Note taking should be a creative activity, involving insight—flashes of inspired connections between concepts—which keep it relevant to you and engaging. It can, however, distract us from allegro reading, so chapter and section breaks can be used as points from which we can pivot between reading and writing—annotating the text provides reminders to take notes at a later point.

Collingwood explained: “whenever I had a cub to lick into shape, my pen is the only tongue I have found useful”. This is why we need to write our reading. In writing we are required to recall what we already know, strengthening the connections that we bring to mind, and storing new memories in their company. We write to know what we know. If writing is combined with teaching others, the effort to express our knowledge in a fashion suitable for people with different schemata helps clarify the limits of our knowledge and suggests questions we may not have considered. This is another reason to participate in discussion groups and make our reading social.

Writing notes helps begin the process of consolidation. This is the cognitive mechanism by which short-term memory traces are encoded into long-term memories. Carroll talked of the need to digest what we read, Nietzsche of walking to achieve the same end, and Schopenhauer of contemplation. This stage of consolidation is so easily overlooked. With the deluge of new titles available to read, it’s tempting to put down one book then pick up the next, but this blunts their power. The new material confuses the old because the old is still in flux: we haven’t absorbed it yet. Distance in time is required between books because we’re reading to be affected; not to read. In fact, Schopenhauer effectively asks: why read when we can think something out for ourselves, advising us not to take up a new book until we again need somebody else to think for us (Schopenhauer 1974, 493–4).

The quantification of reading that encourages rapid turnaround of reading materials is an anathema: care little for how many books you’ve “read”, but for how much you’ve learned. And this applies equally to fiction: finishing the book requires you to think back to the beginning; finis is not the end. Without this meditative period, so much of the depth of a book remains hidden. A denouement is a prompt for you to reconsider what you read in light of the whole. Montaigne did this “through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading.” (Bayard 2007, 51).

Books are truly useful to the extent they affect you, and you only learn if these effects persist. We’ll still forget even somewhat consolidated memories unless we make use of them, recall them. They decay through disuse. Some material benefits from being practically applied, with each application forcing the recall thus re-remembering of the idea. When we can apply the new knowledge to our projects, our understanding of ourselves and others, and employ it in our decisions, it gains a new kind of purchase on our memories. Knowledge is for the hand as well as the mind.

Rereading the text or your notes is an ineffective aid to consolidation because it’s passive. It tends to produce an illusion of understanding. If we wish to consolidate specific information, we need to recall actively, e.g. write what we think we learned, then verify our accuracy. The effort of retrieval is what matters: by recollecting knowledge we identify gaps in our understanding and re-encode existing memories. In general, some form of spaced repetition using software such as Anki¹ is recommended. These programs infer when your memories of concepts for which you’ve created flashcards are likely to decay, and prompt you to recall them before this point: the process of recollection helps solidify the memory for the longer term. If we create flashcards for interesting concepts and insights we encounter in our reading, expressed in our words, and habitually review them according to the schedule the software suggests, we improve our chances of learning from what we read.

We must read in a circle because we live in a circle. Our experiences affect our conceptions of the world, and our updated conceptions affect our experiences. We want to move in ever-expanding circles that themselves are composed of circles such that our schemata grow broader and deeper. We wish to write our autobiography by integrating these experiences into our self-schema. Yet we’re disposed to circle like a goat on a stake, a moth around a flame, or a sprinter around a track.

We tend towards these stereotypes due to schema-driven expectations, confirmation bias, tunnel vision—our attraction to what we know. This is cognitively undemanding: our attention is diffuse and often elsewhere because it’s not hugely necessary. A consequence of rarely seeing anything new and exciting, and not paying attention to what we do see, is that there is little to learn or remember—so we forget.

To combat this narrowing, to allow books to change and expand our horizons, we approach reading as a skill to be honed. We select titles according to principles involving posterity, emotionality, and our developing taste, in conscious pursuit of diversity. We read over distances which are made productive when we attempt to fuse horizons with the text rather than attempting to occupy its site of production or become its author.

Interpretative communities constrain meaning by perpetuating norms and values, helping us pose better questions to ask a text, and skilfully evaluate its truth. They keep us connected to others. We recognise our membership in these communities and can choose to inhabit others.

Literary truth, like literary meaning, is a product of community consensus, so varies over community, genre, and time. Even when we apply the norms of our interpretative community to a text by engaging in a logic of question and answer, we face an aporia of reading such that we simultaneously need to enter into the context of the text and also remain at a remove to judge it critically. We question the text and ourselves.

We learn from texts which sufficiently challenge us when we can build upon a firm foundational schema, then express the relevant ideas and concepts they impart in our own words and with our own examples. We become better readers when we practice making ourselves vulnerable to worthwhile texts, and reading them with the care and attentiveness that allows them to stay with us.

We encircle worlds through reading, moving backward and forward through time, crossing borders freely, when we are driven to situations that challenge and engage. We do so from within communities and as we expand our own schemata, we aim to improve those of our community, too.

Around, past Parnassus, Simorgh,
from flocking fledglings to our soar-
ing independence, out of the
warming current, the glaring sun,
closer still to the horizon,
returning with songs of our own:
an eye on distant, drifting land,
an eye for the life it hides, and
the claws to carry it with us.