“To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it.”

March 13, 2024 6:08 PM

After Mrs. Dalloway and before To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote her first essay for The Yale Review. Nine more followed.
TYR republished them online today, with an introductory essay by Claire Messud.
posted by thatwhichfalls (6 comments total)

I will read the essays soon so I can make more of a reasoned response.

But the books that have struck the most wonder and delight in me are ones that I never could have written because their imagination extended beyond the bounds of where my mind normally lives. I would not necessarily want to read a book that I could have written; I want to read books that extend my belief of what humans can think and imagine beyond my own abilities.
posted by hippybear at 7:16 PM on March 13

"If therefore we take “Aurora Leigh” from the shelf and open it, it is not so much in order to read it as to muse with kindly condescension over this token of bygone fashion: it is not a book but a dusty mantle with fringes and furbelows that our grandmothers actually wore; a cluster of wax fruit that they stood in a glass case on the drawing-room table among albums, views of Jerusalem, and handsome models of the Taj Mahal carved in alabaster. But to the Victorians, undoubtedly, the book was very dear as a book."

howoucch!
what would Vita and Harold think.
posted by clavdivs at 7:27 PM on March 13 [3 favorites]

hippybear - you may be pleased to know that what you're saying is actually very similar to the point that I think Woolf herself is making in that particular essay.
posted by augustimagination at 12:24 AM on March 14 [2 favorites]

haven't read the essays yet - but have them loaded to read. But what the post says is similar to what I tell my college students in literature and composition: learn to ask why the author made this choice. The wonderful effect of this approach is that you begin to realize that writing is a long series of choices - even if it was a "happy accident" according to the author, they still chose to keep it. Students, at least in American public education, are forced into a very literal form of reading in order to be standardized tested on the "content." The concept and ability to read beyond the literal, which so many Mefites take for granted, is NOT normal or intuitive to many readers today.
posted by jkosmicki at 10:55 AM on March 14 [1 favorite]

learn to ask why the author made this choice

Okay, so honest answer here.

Stephen R Donaldson recently wrapped up a trilogy of books, and it was a bit of a struggle for him to get the final volume published. Part of that is that he isn't really a famous author these days and his books aren't flying off the shelves, but also that the first version of the book he turned in was reportedly 12,000 pages long or something.

So he edited and edited and edited, with his editor and several other readers helping him trim it down, and he did finally get a book down to a length that the publisher would agree to and then had to argue with the publisher about even publishing it at all because of his declining sales.

But he DID get it published.

The thing is... and I don't really notice this kind of thing very often, but I feel like I can FEEL some of the cuts in the book, like there's scar tissue that had built up a bump there like braille in the text.

There are parts of it that feel pretty well disguised, but other parts that are REALLY harsh, with a couple of paragraphs summazing what was probably another novella's worth of material, if not more.

Honest to god, I have never really noticed much before how an author was editing their work to achieve publication. But I'd followed this coming to print for a long while and it was weird to read it and sort of FEEL what was going on.

Would I have felt those things if I had not followed the publication struggles of the book? I have no idea. I think maybe, because Donaldson is weirdly the only author I've read everything they've written, and I could see the cracks.

Just a strange thing to think about given that experience.
posted by hippybear at 8:18 PM on March 14

I think it has to do with something with reading comprehension and I mean that in a positive way. I noticed that in the wasteland in like the first year I read it and when I saw the texts that pound edited it was if, I don't know, More than a feeling but perhaps it was comportment for the sake of literary exigency. perhaps it's akin to some of these essays written long ago, and when we read them they seem a fresh, snarky, vivid, given what we know about these authors biographically today it shifts perception to a degree. haven't thought about Turgenev in years. Virginia wrote: C’est un colosse charmant, un doux géant aux cheveux blancs, qui a l’air du bienveillant génie d’une montagne ou d’une forêt. II est beau, grandement beau, énormément beau, avec du bleu du ciel dans les yeux, avec le charme du chantonnement de l’accent russe, de cette cantilène où il y a un rien de l’enfant et du nègre,” "the brothers Goncourt wrote of him when they met him at dinner in 1863. And Henry James noted later the great physical splendor, the Slav languor and “the air of neglected strength, as if it had been part of his modesty never to remind mself that he was strong"
those old lit. Bros could be f****** Savage.
But I think Woolf addresses that feeling.

"We notice that though the people talk in the most natural speaking voices what they say is always unexpected; the meaning goes on after the sound has stopped. Moreover, they do not have to speak in order to make us feel their presence: “Volintsev started and raised his head, as though he had just waked up”—we had felt him there though he had not spoken. And when in some pause we look out of the window, the emotion is returned to us, deepened, because it is given through another medium, by the trees or the clouds, by the barking of a dog, or the song of a nightingale."

Wallace Stevens. thinking of Steven's biographically I get this image of a man with a hat and a cane walking down a oak Lane with a briefcase looking down thinking about something something anything that doesn't have to do with himself perhaps, for his time he said with a wisp of the litinany of hurricanes and the preoccupation with out- dstancing the timekeepers.

"it comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions, as the ponderous
Deflations of distance; or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see."

-The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
posted by clavdivs at 9:23 PM on March 14