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By Anna Holmes

Skipping parts of a narrative should be encouraged, particularly if an author is writing without clarity of purpose or showing off.

Image Anna Holmes Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

In answer to this question, several possibilities immediately came to mind. Approaching it with preconceived notions about writer or subject. Reading elements of it out of order. Skipping — or skimming — portions of the narrative. Turning the book upside down.

But none of these (except, maybe, the last one) qualify as wholly “wrong” to me. Preconceived notions, for instance, are impossible to avoid, and I’m not sure it’s even desirable for a person to try to divorce herself from her own experience — deriving meaning from a work of art has as much to do with audience interpretation as an artist’s intention — or to ignore what book editors and publishers want to communicate about a story. After all, part of the point of cover design — not to mention advertising other things, like the author’s name, gender, race and age — is to telegraph to readers what a book might be, and to shape how it might be received. This can be done for mercenary reasons, yes, but it can also help a book find its readers.

As for reading portions of a narrative out of order, some books are obviously meant to be consumed this way (collections of essays and poetry; reference books and anthologies) — or, at the very least, manage to dispense with the very idea of a “beginning” and an “end.” Skipping or skimming parts of a narrative should not only be expected but encouraged, particularly if an author is writing without clarity or purpose or showing off. Life’s too short to slog through some smarty-pants attempt to demonstrate a mastery of mechanical engineering or botany. (I’m reminded of an experience I had with Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” a book with a provocative plot but occasionally mind-numbing passages of pedantry and technical detail.)

Of course, the question depends on what one’s concept or definition of “reading” is. Does it mean the mental processing of words through sight or touch? Or does it refer to something more analytic and interpretive? While I was working on this essay, a friend of mine argued over email that people can, and do, “wrongly” read Nabokov’s “Lolita” as a narrative that validates, legitimizes and even glorifies a grown man’s attraction to children. As much as this strikes me as a woeful misreading of “Lolita,” I’m hesitant to embrace the idea of a definitive line between “right” or “wrong,” at least with regard to art. After all, isn’t part of the point of artistic expression to open itself up to possibilities and varying interpretations, even discomfiting ones?

In the end, what I keep coming back to is the idea that if there are wrong ways to read a book, there must be right ones as well — in other words, if we’re interested in figuring out what’s wrong about reading, we might be better off determining what’s right and working backward from there. Here, I’ll cede the floor to the great Doris Lessing, who, in the introduction to the 1971 edition of her novel “The Golden Notebook,” provided her own rule:

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are 20 or 30 will open doors for you when you are 40 or 50 — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

In other words, it’s personal. Which sounds about right to me.

Anna Holmes is an award-winning writer who has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Newsweek and The New Yorker online. She is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s website she created in 2007. She is an editorial executive at First Look Media and lives in New York.