How To Read A Novel
This frame should apply to all advice-seekers and givers, of every domain:
The only advice, indeed, that one person can 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…you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.
…few people ask from books what books can give us.
Woolf published around 300 reviews, essays, and notes in her career! The more reviews I read, the more I wonder: do authors bring a different empathy to their critiques?
Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read…open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
Attempting to write on your own makes you appreciate the work of others with a deeper understanding.
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write – to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.
How do craft such a sharp essay?
I’m in awe of Woolf’s dedication, four revisions, each more precise than the last. What began as a school talk in 1926 was published in The Yale Review that same year, then refined and republished in The Second Common Reader in 1932. Link to a version of this essay.