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By Dana Stevens

Being a “good reader” might not be enough to sustain me in my intellectual and professional life.

Image Dana Stevens Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

I don’t remember the moment I learned to read — though it must have happened before first grade, because I can still summon the tedium of sitting in a circle on a braided rug, reading aloud from deadly “Dick and Jane”-style primers whose only hint of conflict lay in the extratextual struggle between reader and alphabet. But I do recall distinctly the moment, many years later, in which I started learning to unread. I was in my early 20s, at the start of a doctoral program in literature and just beginning to realize that for the first time in my experience, being a “good reader” — which then meant, in my narrow understanding of the term, a relatively speedy, indiscriminately voracious, knowledge-­accumulating kind of reader — might not be enough to sustain me in my intellectual and professional life. All around me, it soon became clear, were examples of a different kind of reader, people (some of them professors, some colleagues and friends, some critics I knew only on the page) who read slowly but intensely, who measured their encounters with the written word in depth rather than in volume. These were readers who could spelunk into the literary and philosophical abyss and come back with insights that made me want to follow them down on their next expedition.

There was a certain kind of writer, too, that attracted this kind of reader. The high-modernist usual suspects, for sure — Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett — but also “modern” writers of any age, reinventors of language and subverters of literary laws: authors like Jorge Luis Borges or Fernando Pessoa or Herman Melville, whose work seemed to unwrite whatever had come before and clear new ground for the potential of written expression. In all my years as an avid consumer of whatever form of text I could get my hands on, I had never thought to step back and question the act of consumption itself. What was reading for, besides the transmission of knowledge or the provision of pleasure, entertainment or distraction? What was the highest ambition of literature, the most one could hope for from the experience of reading? One possible answer, it turned out, had to do with a different approach to reading, one based not on a model of linearity, forward progress and accumulation, but on the idea that a reader should be stopped short, turned around, even undone by the text on the page before her. Which is, come to think of it, a very modernist idea in itself: an overturning of values, the razing of the ground in order to build something new. The 20th century may have been nearing its end, but in the apparently still-­Victorian world of my suburbia-bred intellect, it was 1913.

It isn’t so much, then, that I grew into these writers as that I let their complex and sophisticated use of language reduce me to a child who had to learn to read all over again: back on that dusty braided rug, this time struggling with the alphabet. I recently had dinner with a friend from those grad-school days — one of my first exemplars of the benefits of this mode of reading — and he confessed that as time goes on, he finds himself reading slower and slower, as if every sentence (in a book worth reading, at least) offers up an infinity of potential rabbit holes. Hearing this was a reminder that — as anxious as I may get about all the great books I’ll never live long enough to cram into my head — there are times when the only strategy that makes sense is to stop cramming, take a deep breath and start again from the beginning of whatever sentence you’re on.

Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among other publications.