Chekhov's Mistress
Zadie Smith on reading
I had already linked to Zadie Smith’s article ”Fail Better” in the weekend’s The Guardian, and there’s a lot of fodder there for thought, but I thought I would highlight this piece because I think it speaks to what a lot of people are doing when they write about books in the blogosphere, becoming better readers:
A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing – I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.
This is a conception of “reading” we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer’s style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.
comments
How lovely, wise, and, well, *calm* Smith seems, in comparison to others writers commenting on this subject in the last few years. Ben Marcus, assaulting Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s, comes to mind, on cuckoo shortlist.
Sort of makes me want to read more Zadie Smith.
– Matt Ellsworth (01/16 at 01:58 PM)
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Previous entry: Worth Reading: Zadie Smith, Fail Better
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: January 14, 2007
- Filed Under:
Litbloggers & Blog Floggers
- Comments:1
- Links to this Post: Technorati
