I’ve never been a naturally analytical reader–I like to mainline stories directly into my brain as quickly as possible. I loved this description of reading like a child from a dad writing on The Morning News this week:
“We take it for granted that there is a thick, clear line between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy…For small children like Talia, though, that line is blurry, and often simply not there.
“To her, I realized, the line between dream and waking life was a distinction without a fundamental difference. She has no problem grasping what a dream is, and that it is different from what happens when she is awake. It is just that for her, the distinction is not a categorical one, but conditional—in the same way that some things are inside and some are outside, but could easily swap places. Everything is potentially true, and nothing is completely fictional.
“Imagine, then, what it is like for her to read a book. The characters, the stories, the settings—they’re not real in the sense that she and I are real, she knows that. But they have a foothold in our reality, too. When she sees a man dressed up as Elmo in Times Square, not only does she believe that he is actually Elmo, but she’s not all that surprised to see him. He is simply at the end of the spectrum of reality closest to her, for the moment; later that evening he will be in a Sesame Street video on YouTube, and still later in Elmo’s ABC Book, and it all makes sense to her. She’s like the couple in the video for A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” moving effortlessly between the reality of the page and the reality outside it.”
Storybooks for a toddler are just likely to be true as anything else grown-ups tell them about the world. I feel a lot of internal/artistic pressure to be a more critical reader, to take notes, to become someone who mull over theme and symbolism and the rest while I’m reading, to deconstruct the craft of it. But what I love best is just forgetting myself entirely in someone else’s world.
Risen goes on:
“I learned to appreciate the aesthetics of the written word—the well-wrought shape of a character, the finely crafted turn of phrase, the genius deployment of irony. But these things still leave me cold. Beautiful, yes, but like a painting in an art museum, not a living thing the way I imagine I used to find the contents of a book.”
…Watching Talia listen to me read has helped me understand why I once kept coming back to books, well into my teen years. It wasn’t the love for the beautiful prose (because, come on: Hardy Boys). It was a residual sense of wonder, left over long after I had accepted that the reality on the page and the reality beyond it are distinct.”
I needed this permission to read the way I want to read—recklessly. Pausing and re-reading to appreciate the art of a line or a scene for as long as it takes, then letting myself turn the page and forget about it. I hate that I forget, but instead of telling myself that I should take more notes, I’m going to think of it like eating protein. I don’t have to remember what I ate for breakfast for it to stay in my bones.
Reading this way has built me sentence by sentence into the particular pattern of firing synapses that makes me who I am. I’ve seen the world through so many perspectives by losing myself in someone else’s words, and that experience doesn’t leave me when I put down the book, even if I can’t ever remember how it ended.
a little because because 