How to read a book_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

How to read a book

However, if you ask the viewer to imagine mimicking the painter drawing a picture, then that would be a similar experience to reading a book. Imagine drawing the picture yourself but with the author's hand and pencil. The pencil zigzags, this way and that way, with a line here and a dot there before the whole thing is put together. Let the zigzagging pencil represent the writer's pen making “twists and turns” on a page and you get what writing is like.

So, how to read an author?

Withhold judgment. Hear the author out. Finish the whole thing before saying to yourself, oh, I got it! – if you ever get it and actually have to say it.

Otherwise you get one of those common reading experiences in which you come to a judgment of a book before finishing the first page(s). And you put the book down and go away talking about its author as though you have known the man inside out.

That's not fair to the author, who mostly wants you to hear him out. Neither is it fair to you, the reader who has forked out cash for the book.

The author gets the best of the bargain of course. As it is with the doctor, who is guaranteed to make money once a patient crosses his door no matter if his prescription provides a cure; the author is guaranteed to make an income once the reader buys the book, whether they finish reading the whole volume or just the first page, whether they praise his work or trash it.