Pondering the way we read

In cross-generational discussions about school and books, there is a common phrase:

“Oh yeeeah, I read that in college.”

The Scarlet Letter. Hamlet. Paradise Lost. Leaves of Grass.

If you are a liberal arts student talking with a college graduate, the odds are that it’s all been read before. And, circumventing various questions about the problematic nature of formulating the literary canon, let’s just say that in most cases there is a reason why these classics are still being assigned. Now it is more likely that they are supplemented with letters, post-modern critical literary analysis and illuminating biographical contexts—but still, Great Expectations is very much the same text it was 50, 100, 150 years ago.

My question for the moment, however, is not whether reading these works is warranted and worthwhile (I think it is, of course)—my question is, what does that obvious rejoinder mean?

“I read it in college.” “We read that in high school.”

Did you? Am I, really? Depends on your definition of reading.

As a senior at a prestigious private college, I have to say my idea of “reading” is a little warped these days. Between practices, meetings, school newspaper articles, my campus job and being in class, I have precious little time for reading the work assigned for my three seminars.

I think I do as well or better than most at completing the majority of my assigned reading. But there seems to be a basic understanding that people who can and do complete it all are either inhuman superachievers or otherwise have no other commitments to speak of (and are therefore lazy or uninvolved).

While this fact of life is given among my friends and classmates, there is no reason to assume that our sometime definition of “reading”—that is, skimming the last 150 pages of a 450 page book or reading only the first and last page of an article—extends beyond Vassar. Right?

During Spring Break, it was my happy task to read the great American classic, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I was spending the week with my grandparents on the beach, so reading this 427-page book (printed on bible paper, of course) should not have been much of an onerous assignment.

One afternoon, upon returning from the grocery store, my grandfather came upon me sprawled out on the couch, the text sprawled next to me with my thumb in it, as I slept.

“How’s that book coming?” he laughed when I awoke, adding, “Yeah, that’s pretty much how I read it too.” He said he’d find a comfy chair on the top floor of the library and read a nice fat paragraph of Melville’s uhh..descriptive.. prose before conking out.

So, I thought, maybe my concept of “reading” is not so new after all.

Don’t misunderstand me: as students, we do an unbelievable amount of work. Most of the people I know are absurdly on top of their lives.

And as for myself, over the past four years I have become a much better reader, in a perhaps atypical definition of the word.

See, “to read” can mean glossing your eyes over printed words and absorbing their meaning. But it can also mean interpreting, uncovering, exploring. The latter definition is the skill that I have lately honed; it is the rarer and more important ability.

Being able to “read” in a broader sense is a vital skill for interpreting our world of ulterior motives, subliminal messages and double-talk. In a post-modern, post-feminist, post-Freudian world of hypertext, we no longer simply read Shakespeare’s soliloquies, we read films, blogs, and advertisements. We read people’s social networking profiles—understanding the subtle art of when to take individuals’ relationship status or professed favorite quote seriously, or with a hint of irony.

Learning how to interpret the plethora of media surrounding us in our daily lives is learning the difference between what is being said and how it is being said, who is saying it and why they are saying it to us and in such and such a way. We read novels and texts this way, too. Answering these delving questions is the aim of education.

I plan to soldier through Moby Dick and to “read” it, in the traditional sense, in its entirety.

However, I know that no matter what, the most important reading will be done when my book is closed: sitting in class having a discussion about what the whale’s “whiteness” means or debating Ishmael’s narrative reliability on an online Blackboard forum.

While I still love the simple act of reading, I am glad that my education has made me a much better “reader.”