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 B

the author, that is; he’s going to try to ram some very heavy ideas down your throat, but he wants you to fight back. He’s not interested in yes-men.
    The pleasure here is of entering into enchantment
slowly
, consciously, with vigilance. Don’t be a pushover. If you feel the writer’s careless – he’s trying to run before he can walk, he imagines you’re a sucker for a bit of blood spilt in the first sentence, or in need of easy sentiment, or titillation – you have every right to resist. You have every right to put a book down after a couple of pages, which is why it’s always wise to read a little before buying. Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.
    Basically, what I’m saying is that there are two sources of pleasure that you suppose to be in competition with each other, cancelling each other out, but actually they’re not. If you learn to blend them, they actually intensify each other.
    The first, as we said, is enchantment, the business of succumbing to the way someone else constructs the world, in words, to the rhythm of his sentences, the sound patterns of his language, and the relationship of these rhythms and patterns to the things being said, the things happening in the book. It’s a wonderful thing to let go of your own way of telling yourself the world and allow someone else to do it for you.
    But the second pleasure is awareness, wakefulness: the capacity to see, feel and consciously register all that is going on around you and inside you. Actually, the inside and outside awarenesses are pretty difficult to separate, since your perception of what’s going on outside you is something that you are always assembling inside your head. It’s true the world is out there, and not in your head, but equally true that your idea of it, how it looks and feels, is a constant process of creation on your part, and that is very definitely in your head. So when I say awareness of a book, a writer, his sentences, his stories, I also mean awareness of how I am engaging with the writer and responding to him. Because, for me, his book only exists in relation to me and in my response to it. It is not an absolute.
    What I’m talking about then is a pleasure that combines relaxation and effort, immersion and detachment, letting go and being vigilant – consciously savouring, if you like, the experience of letting go; or again, understanding what it means to be a person who lets go when reading this kind of book.
    I fear this will sound mysterious. We need examples.
    Let’s say I love reading detective stories, or sentimental romances, or chick-lit. Some genre fix. I know what I’m after, I choose the right cover and blurb. The book begins the way these books always begin. I accept an enchantment I’ve accepted a thousand times before. I kill a few hours pleasantly enough. Maybe I relax. Maybe I read really fast because I’m already a bit irritated that I’m wasting so much damn time reading a book like a million others I’ve already read. Still, I know I’ll do it again. Much the way I know I’ll always go back to chocolate even when I tell myself not to. I love eating chocolate and, even while I’m loving it, I worry that I’m eating chocolate again. Etc. Etc.
    This is one kind of reading experience. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing special either.
    Now let’s imagine we pick up a
Harry Potter
or, for a different age group, a Murakami, or a Salman Rushdie. Or even a classic:
Vanity Fair, Tess of the D’Urbevilles
. We know it’s successful stuff. We know it’s safe to say we like it. We allow the rhythms to take over at once. We sink immediately and totally into its spell. We have a wonderful experience. But at the end, as the spell wears off, we begin to realise that we don’t actually agree with a lot of the lines the book was selling. We’re not entirely happy about some of the feelings that were aroused. Or a friend points out some massive flaw