Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil Read Free Book Online Page A

beginning and an end. To reassure ourselves that it is really there we invented another word: identity. And another: character. And another: personality. The more words, the more our invention exists.
    Self is a linguistic creation. It’s hard to have a self without words.
    Every self has a story. It exists in relation to other selves and other stories. In a continuum. It seeks to distinguish itself by comparing itself with others, using terms of comparison that again are all words – fear courage, good bad, happy sad, winner loser.
    The self exists in a web of words spun out of the mind, separate from the world of sense.
    So, these writers telling their stories, scribbling their novels, are exploiting this state of affairs. Using thousands upon thousands of soundless signs, they mimic the way we are forever constructing our lives and the lives of others, in words. They reinforce a process we are all involved in. This is why we get interested. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we refer every story that we read to ourselves, our lives, because the medium of written narrative is intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. Some stories will be liberating: Ah, such and such a thing is possible after all, despite what our friends and parents say. Some stories will remind us of dangers: Do this and you’ll end badly, mate. But wait a minute; maybe that thing I want to do is only possible in the world the writer is talking about. Not in my world. Maybe that ending badly had to do with other times, other places, not my time, not my place. Nobody’s stoned for adultery in London. We have to get a sense of where a story is coming from. Context is everything. We have to remember that some of the most brilliant writers were not necessarily wise, not trustworthy.
    If we read fast, superficially, for plot, to get through, so as to congratulate ourselves we’ve read a big book that everybody else is reading, or just to get a shot of intense feeling, we’re not only missing out on certain pleasures, we’re actually putting ourselves at risk, leaving ourselves open to messages and attitudes we haven’t weighed up, allowing ourselves to be troubled or enthused, or even terrified, without really knowing if there’s any cause to be.
    What pleasures?
    I’m going to say that it’s learning how to take intense pleasure in reading that makes it also useful for us, really useful and really exciting. And safe, or fairly safe. So I’d better describe this pleasure well.
    Enchantment is part of it. But only part. ‘Enchantment’, from the Latin,
incantare
, an entering into song, into chant. The opening sentences of a novel are an invitation to enter a separate world of rhythm and sound, mental activity and social positioning. They have a voice, a feeling, a direction:
    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
    If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.
    The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it as if he were free in a mew in West Brompton.
    However fast you like to read a book overall, make very sure you read the opening page or two with the utmost care, savouring every word, thinking about where this writer is coming from and what kind of spell she or he is trying to draw you into, how anxious he is to impress, whether he’s treating you as dumb or smart, whether he’s serious, whether he’s fun. The first few pages of any Thomas Hardy novel will warn you that the reading experience you can expect is one of waiting for disaster to strike; if you’re not up for it, there’s still time to bail out. The first few sentences of any D. H. Lawrence story tell you that you’d better be ready for an argument – with