Virginia Woolf's On How to Read a Book: Great Help and A Few Surprises

     What do you get when a first rate novelist helps us understand how to read a book, that is any book? You get a fine essay that offers numerous helpful hints. In this important, but short essay, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) serves as a most helpful guide. While many would tout her experience as a novelist, it is also clear she was a keen and avid reader. 
     There are several delightful tips she offers, and a few surprises. Being the passionate persona and author she was, it does not catch us off guard that Woolf affirms "we learn by emotions." Later, when writing of poetry she states, that "the intensity of poetry covers an immense range of emotion." We should not see in Woolf a mere romantic when it comes to literature. 
     Early in the essay, Woolf says, that a reader ought not to make judgments, but in another part of the essay we are encouraged to make judgments. This is not a contradiction as we learn that Woolf is describing our relationship to a reading. At first, we need to suspend certain judgments (remember you can't always judge a book by its cover) and she describes it as a movement from being "friend to being judge." 
     Another surprise is that Woolf tells us, that "the only advice, indeed, that one person could give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." This is a case where she does not follow through, as she does give some advice, and it is helpful. It may be that she is arguing that one person cannot dictate the literary tastes of another, but she does advise that "we can train our taste." It is clear from this essay that Woolf is nudging us to elevate those taste to the finer works of literature, philosophy, biography, and history. 
     As Woolf offers some specifics on being a good reader, she notes that "to read a novel is a difficult and complex art." Clearly she is talking about the sort of reading, reading in a rich and meaningful manner that is demanding, but rewarding. The kind of reading she is describing is not mere surface reading of shallow books. This kind of reading implies certain guiding principles. We need to have certain expectations.

     Showing that she is assisting the reader to become more discriminating and mindful, Woolf says, "thus, with our taste to guide us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions...let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind."
     In my favorite part of the essay, Woolf powerfully describes the soul of the avid reader, the internal disposition of the reader who is affected by all types of books, "when it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts–poetry, fiction, history, biography–and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective."
     One of the simplest suggestions for more effective reading, and yet, one that is often forgotten is (regardless of the reading) the practice of comparing each part of the reading with the reading as a whole. It is very similar to building a puzzle and seeing how each piece fits into the adjoining pieces and how each particular piece is an essential part of the whole. 
     Lest anyone think that Woolf was a bookworm and stayed shut-up in libraries reading all the time, we receive a grand insight from her about the relationship between books and life, life and books. "Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its a relevance, its perpetual movement–the colts galloping around the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long acrid, moan. The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys."
     Among the many delightful insights, Woolf states books, "are only able to help us if we come to them laden with questions and suggestions one honestly in the course of our own reading." No doubt that this is part of what separates bad readers from good readers and great ones from good ones. The best books that require some effort and offer much do indeed call for robust reading and a helpful guide.

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