book-life
It is comforting to think that there can be a simple guide for how to read a book (i.e., the ‘X-ray method’). Obviously, the essay mentioned in the previous sentence is not about how to read all books, because one reads books for different purposes, but it is a fairly personable account of how to read academic books (generally in the humanities/social sciences) – well, not so much ‘how to read’ such books as ‘how to extract value’ (where value is taken to mean ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ or ‘padding for one’s bibliography’ or ‘the appearance of familiarity with the contents’)1 from them. I was thinking about it this morning as I was reading my daily dose of Marsha M. Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Manual, which I am only reading because it was mentioned in passing in Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow.2 It is, however, turning out to be as suggestive as a novel, with its allusions to group dynamics and leadership struggles between pairs of skills trainers, or the trainer who is urged by her co-trainer to drink a soda before an evening session to boost her flagging energy (in itself a modeling of the sort of anecdote a trainer should share with the participants to seem approachable and make the skills seem applicable). Perhaps part of what helps make the book interesting (or that makes it possible for me to be interested in it) is being able to read it without purpose, to be aimless in my attention; no one will test me on it, question me about it, or ask me to apply the information in any way. I am accountable to no one but myself for what I take away from it – but then I have always been fond of the novel method of reading.
- Cf. the amusing but also fairly stupid How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. (Naturally the book isn’t stupid as such, but it wears the mask of stupidity and there comes a point [great shades of the happy hypocrite] when the face beneath comes to resemble the mask, as it were.) [↩]
- Would the reader instructed in book–life balance have chosen Linehan’s manual as a follow-up to Li’s memoir? Perhaps. Although it is also safe to say that the X-ray approach is not aimed at primary texts, and only time and faith (and perhaps a fevered imagination) can transform secondary literature into a real text, like the rabbit in the story. The sighthound, however, will pursue even the suggestion of prey. [↩]