I love this topic!

This chapter talks a lot about reader responses and how what one person can interpret can be wildly different from what another person interprets.

This has actually been one of my favorite topics of discussion in regards to reading for a long time. I really love seeing how different people can read the exact same thing and understand something totally different. I also love trying to figure out what the "true" meaning of text is, or weather the author even meant for there to be any specific meaning.

There is a line early in this chapter that I disagree with. Adena Rosmarin says that a "literary work can be likened to an incomplete work of sculpture", and that to really understand it you have to be able to visualise the big picture of the work in your head. But I don't think that's true. When I read something I don't usually visualise the entire, finished work as I am reading. Rarely do I ever even "analyze" while I'm in the process of reading. That comes after. In my opinion, if a work really is like a sculpture, then it's more like the kind of sculpture that kindergarteners make, where you just kind of go with it and let it form into whatever it's going to be and then decide what it all means in the end. I think if you try to understand what you're reading from the very beginning, you might accidentally end up inserting your own meaning or trying to force whatever you initially thought to fit into the work.

There is another section which stood out to me, which was that "reading is a 'rule-goverened transformative activity' in which the readers actively transform the text by paraphrasing and interpreting it" To me this goes right back into the idea that one reader can interpret a work much differently than another, depending what a reader decides to give importance to. Take this sentence:

"The homeless man trudged down the road slowly, looking off into the deep blue water of the lake that ran parallel to the street"

Some readers may focus on the colors and physical imagry of the sentence more than anything. Their first thought may be that the lake's deep blue color is representative of the man's sadness, and that's why he's walking slowly. Or that the lake being parallel to the road is symbolic of the man's long and seemingly never ending journey. Others might focus first on the man, the human element of the story. They might wonder why he is homeless, or feel bad for him, or feel disgusted with him. If you asked all these people what the sentence was about, one might say "It's about a poor, unfortunate man", another might say 'it's about sadness", another might say, "it's about the difficulty of human life", another might say,"it's a cautionary tale about working hard so you don't end up like this guy" etc. Just a single sentence can have so many different meanings just depending on which word you focus on, so an entire book or literary work can have a much bigger and even more different, or "off-the-wall" meaning, as the Reader-Response Critisism puts it.

Intros are hard

I really like it when books cut to the chase and "start in the middle". The beginning of the dead does not give an introduction or lead in, it simply jumps right into the action. The beginning is always the most difficult for me in any piece of writing. Introductions always seem very stilted and awkward to me, so I prefer to just start writing without any lead in.

Book Readings

On page 250 Manguel remarks that "reading publicly was...the best way to aquire an audience" and goes on to talk about how reading publicly helped both the author and the book-publishing house, because it garnered the people's attention and caused them to want to buy the published version. This very much reminded me of public book-signings, where authors will often read a passage of their book and fans can come and get their copies signed. I thought it was interesting to note how the order is now backwards though. Where once an author became famous because he went out and read his book out loud, nowadays authors do book signings because they already are famous. He also later goes on to say that these readings were also a sort of "proofreading" step for the authors, who would often go back and amend their works depending on how the reading went and the reactions of the audience. This would be almost unheard of in modern times, I think, because normally books, once they are published in their final form, do not typically get edited and changed by the author. The exceptions I can think to this are textbooks, which change sometimes as often as annually, or in instances where publishing houses find typos in books.