(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Jackson was a British journalist, writer, publisher, and bibliophile.
Reading is the art of adjusting literature to life (Jackson 1946, 11), therefore the reader is an artist, and their creation, themselves. A book is “one of the media of an art as well as a work of art” (pp. 25–6):
Books properly understood and used should co-ordinate the experiences of reader and writer, producing a harmony out of two assertive forces, that of an author who says in effect, ‘I am,’ and of a reader who says… ‘I become’. But the reader does not become the author, he becomes himself.
Literature enables a reader to “more vividly and more satisfactorily” apprehend themselves than if left to their own devices, to see beyond what we’re in the habit of seeing (p. 25). The novelist sharpens our sense of observation, attuning us to characters we wouldn’t have noticed (p. 88). This requires the reader to involuntarily place themselves in the “attitude of the writer” without losing their identity: neither wholly absorbing the book nor following it implicitly (p. 27). The reader goes forth “from themselves and after a while they return home having gained something and lost something” (ibid.).
As an artist the reader requires an alertness of the senses, the mind, and the imagination (p. 11). They exercise these faculties by reading “in a controlled appreciation of a book” such that they participate in the aesthetic experience of the author while distilling it into an aesthetic experience of their own (ibid.). Reading is a synthesis of these faculties concentrated by perception, and books yield their meaning to those who observe their facets and depths precisely (p. 85). The reader sees nothing unless they’re continually honing their powers of observation (p. 108). Yet, art is inspiration plus technique minus consciousness of technique, so the reader must both develop this constant alertness but also have the ability to forget the technique and, ultimately, the book (pp. 254, 261). We must elevate this watchful stance to habit—so it becomes as natural and forgettable as our digestive process—so we almost lose consciousness of the words on the page.
To exercise our perceptive faculties we must read as writers, with our ears as well as our eyes, noticing “Rhythm, Symbolism, Allusion, Plot, Character, Mythology, Rhetoric, and Geography” (pp. 200, 110). To perceive how words sound, their rhythms and rhymes, we need to develop a “good ear” through “attentive listening” (pp. 115, 117, 110). In addition to the sense-values of words, phrases, and sentences, we must be attentive to their sound-values because these contribute to their meaning and our understanding (p. 110). Hearing the text is not an optional aspect of reading; without a good ear we are deaf to meaning.
Sensitivity to word-values is vital for both writer and reader because of the mutability of words (p. 122). The meaning of words is in constant flux, they’re used in changing circumstances by changing people, so have lives of their own which have been constituted by these experiences (pp. 128, 122). Long after words and phrases lose their original meanings, we remain loyal because we, too, are conditioned by them (pp. 148–9). Words (pp. 122–3):
are keys with which we unlock doors of imagination and knowledge, and if writers use the wrong, or the misshapen word, or readers misinterpret the right word, the keys will not function and may even break the lock!
Jackson conceives reading as a game of hide-and-seek: as “readers seek and deny themselves in what they read”, writers “expose and disguise themselves in what they write” (pp. 198–9). We have seen how the reader as an artist both seeks themselves in what they read but also avoids surrendering their identity to the author. For the author, disguise can take the form of obscurity and ambiguity, with some feeling that being explicit is to condescend to the reader’s intelligence (p. 198). Their style “often disguises as much as it reveals” (p. 201). Reticence, diffidence, and understatement round out this bag of tricks (p. 197). The reader’s responsibility is to forbid such trickery to subdue them: “To be dominated by a book, even a good book, is like being bossed by a servant, or a canvasser—or a propagandist” (p. 203). To see through these disguises the reader acts as a detective, seeking to discover the ultimate essence of the writer’s meaning by working through the “triple meaning: what the writer said, what he thought he said, and what he meant to say” (p. 198).
Just as the writer disguises themselves, they also expose themselves in all of their methods (p. 204). The major literary forms are “largely autobiography” in that their authors felt an uncontrollable desire to project themselves in text for their own satisfaction (p. 152). Both writer and reader are egocentric: the reader seeks themselves and the writer projects themselves (p. 163). A great novelist is more than a storyteller; their work profoundly expresses their attitude towards life—which is often more interesting than the story (pp. 212, 209). It is the writer’s motives that most deeply affect the reader (p. 231).
Reading is a process of remembering just as much as observation. Books are valuable even if they only help us recall useful or happy memories that would otherwise have lain dormant (p. 109). Indeed, they rarely “put anything into the mind of a reader which is not already there” (p. 266). They make us conscious, or more deeply so, of what we already on some level possess “by stimulating apprehension, by smoothing or ruffling the surface of consciousness, and, in rare instances, by striking below the surface and opening the way to vision or revelation” (ibid.). Reading helps sharpen our observational skills, and the observations of the writer make us more deeply aware of our past observations, in a cycle of self-discovery.
At their best, books revitalise, and do so when they “express rather than inform”, connecting with us on an emotional level by forcing us to readjust ourselves to the experience of our contact with the writer (pp. 266, 14). This is a forcing, a clashing of opinions, rather than an immediate and harmonious adjustment: it startles our dormant consciousness into awaking (p. 14). Approving of the author may even be an impediment to benefiting from their book: a fit reader “may be charmed and disenchanted simultaneously” (p. 20).
“All reading is criticism”, but the fit reader criticises knowingly (p. 52). They never permit a critic to come between them and their book (p. 54). They become their own critic by neither siding with the writer nor ignoring the critic, but learning how criticism works and how it benefits: the critic is useful for their point of view—“the more idiosyncratic the better”—and their opinions “should be resisted but not resented” (pp. 53–4). Criticism should be avoided that “confuses fashion with style” (p. 55):
Style is individual and innate, fashion common and imitative. One is the instinct of a person, the other the behaviour of a group
The fit reader reads to please themselves; they neither habitually follow fashion nor read what they ought (p. 11). Jackson doesn’t advocate classics or reading what one is prescribed because this is likely to “to destroy an authentic gift for reading” (p. 10). Insisting upon reading only established masterpieces is misguided because “[t]he only hundred best books is the hundred that is best for you” (ibid.). Further, a “masterpiece is a truce not a victory, its acceptance as a classic … being challenged at all stages of its history” (p. 255). A great book has the inexhaustible power “to revive, restore, or stimulate consciousness” such that you “find something worth pondering on every time you open it” (pp. 16, 50). Good reading has “depth rather than breadth”, it’s “concentrated rather than extensive”: its quintessence is personal selection (pp. 15, 22). Reading well doesn’t require classics, then, but nor does it require one to be “well read” (p. 22):
the well-read man is often one who has accumulated knowledge at the expense of imagination. He is a scholar not an artist, educated rather than experienced
Jackson recommends ruminative reading: “three parts gloating, dreaming, pondering upon the thing read” (pp. 16, 28):
Every sensitive reading of the kind should be followed by a feeling of satisfaction and reluctance to take up another book. We are content to brood on our new experience and to resent, for the time being, interference with what seems to be an established state of mind.
To appreciate a book is to read it “with something of the quality that went to its making”: “a book is not read until the reader becomes its equal” (p. 28).