Columns: Tag – Entertainment
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Writing Quips and Tips
Reading for pleasure? Oh the horror…
Giving a book talk recently, I was asked most severely by a member of my audience whether my last book had a message. “It is surely not written just for … entertainment.”
I know we read for all kinds of reasons, but seeing books purely as the means to enhance moral virtues is, in the end, going to make reading unsustainable. It works against the idea of building a strong culture of reading.
There’s nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. I know I’ve touched on this in recent blogs, but I thought it worth returning to, not just because I feel strongly about it, but because I wanted to show that it’s not just my own lonely crusade.
Writing Quips and Tips
There’s nothing passive about reading
Reading is not a one-way process. It’s far more active than a writer imparting and a reader receiving.
The way to get the most from any reading experience is to accept that readers bring as much to the book as writers do.
As readers, we bring a complete psychological engagement to the task. That’s why movies of books we’ve read are never satisfying. Someone else has filled in the holes – and not as satisfyingly as we did.
Reading is construction work. The writer provides sketchy, incomplete blueprints so that each reader can build a different world.
Writer Alberto Manguel calls it the"intelligent and inspired reconstruction … using reason and imagination … to translate it on to a different canvas, extending the horizon of its apparent meaning beyond … the declared intentions of the author”.Page 1 of 1 pages