Friday, January 28, 2011

A Good Reader

Nabokov believes that a good reader should "notice and fondle details". That before one gathers their opinions they must first take in the whole book. He also advises that one should approach a book as if it is a "new world... having no obvious connections to the worlds we already know" and study it with that in mind. He goes further to make a list of qualities a good reader would possess, such as, someone who has an imagination, memory, artistic sense and a dictionary. Furthermore, and maybe of greatest importance is that a good reader is one who rereads.

I agree with Nabokov on his ideas of what a good reader is. The ideas I have always had on the qualities of a good reader are a little different however. Previously I have thought that a good reader should be one who reads fast and can grasp the information and recall it. I do not consider myself a good reader by Nabokov's standards or my own. That being said, I do fall under one of Nabokov's ideas, I am a rereader. I reread like crazy because I will have read a whole page in a book and find that I have no idea what I just read, so I have to go back and read it again. I understand this is not exactly the kind of rereading Nabokov was talking about, but it is probably as close as I am going to get.

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