How Should One Read a Book?

How Should One Read a Book?

This essay, first published in 1932, has never even superseded, probably because no one since Virginia Woolf has been such anomie porous and joyous reader, with a writer's gift to match. She poses the essential question of evaluating anything, whether books or ballplayers or family tiffs, how personal perceptions can become generally valid judgments. Note what she says about Lear at beginning and end. How do you explain this contradiction? Note, too, how she contrasts the present reality outside the window with all those seen through the differing windows of books, or you read, underline those words that seem unusually effective or striking. The essay is built around a central idea, ant that idea has an edge to it, an urging, which silently says you should believe this too.

She does not state this openly, as an argumentative thesis. She might have done so, at the end of an opening paragraph that had drawn us in with her characteristically intelligent charm. Her essay would actually have been clearer; since she begins by saying that nobody can judge and ends by saying that everyone must judge. But we understand her at the end, and we forgive her inductive teasing because she had guided us to understand her thesis after all, and to believe in it as she does.