No one is going to lay down the laws about reading. Here in this room full of books, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here, simple and learned man and woman are alike. Reading is so simple, a mere matter of knowing the alphabet, yet so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Carta. Those area facts, those can be taught. But how are we to teach people so to read Paradise Lost as to see that it is a great poem. or Tess of the D’ Urbervilles to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves?
Directly we begin to think how one should read a book, we are faced by the fact that books differ. There are poems, novels, biographies on the bookshelf. Each different from the other as a tiger from the tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. But if we remember, as we turned to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which consciously or unconsciously tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that and venturing the other. If we try to follow the writer in this experiment from the first word to the last without imposing our design upon him then we should have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.
To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker; become his accomplice. Even if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.
Woolf speculates how Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy might approach writing about meeting a beggar in the street.
Where Jane Austen describes manners, Hardy describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical ... Some may complain Jane Austen is too prosaic or Thomas Hardy too melodramatic, but we have to remind ourselves it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him or her all they can give us. … Great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, is to be wrenched and distorted this way then that.
Everyone is born with a natural bias of his own, in one direction rather than another. One will instinctively accepted Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen's. And reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of this author’s genius. But then, Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels. Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but the trial is always worth making.
If then this is true, that books are of very different types and to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginative powers, first this one way, then another, it's clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting occupations.
Reading is not merely sympathising and understanding, it is also criticising and judging. When the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend. He must become the judge. So we ask, is it good or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? … If we're asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit, to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. If we distract ourselves by some other occupation or just go about our daily business, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without once being aware of it. The different details which accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape. It becomes a castle, a cow shed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be.
Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different. And gives one a different emotion. … Holding this complete shape in mind, it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book's merits. For though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from reading, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process, the after reading is finished and we hold the book clear, secure, and to the best of our powers, complete in our minds.
But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions? Is it good or bad? How good is it? How bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. We cannot go to the critics. There is nothing more disastrous and to crush one’s own foot into another person's shoe. It is not by reading critics, but by realising our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have formulated in the past – the books we have read and the opinions we have formed.
So then, to sum up, have we found any answer to our question? How should we read a book? Clearly no answer will do for everyone, but perhaps a few suggestions.
In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can.
In the next place he will judge with the upmost severity. Every book he will remember as a right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.
It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading. It is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what the pleasure maybe. But that pleasure, mysterious, unknown, useless as it is, is enough.
That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects that it would not be in the least surprising to discover on the Day of Judgement, when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason we have grown from pigs to men and women, come out from our caves and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat around the fire and talked and drunk and made merry, and given to the poor and helped the sick, and made pavements and houses, and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
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