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.

How exactly do we read?

On page 37 Maguel talks about how when we read we don't actually read from left to right, but rather we read very erratically, with our eyes jumping all over the page, piecing together bits of information at a shockingly fast rate. It had never occured to me to think about how it is that we read, physically. To me, reading has always been about the abstract; analyzation and contructive thinking, etc. But it was really fascinating to stop and think about the movement of my eyes and how it relates to my brain actually taking those bits of unrelated information and putting them together into something I can understand and process all in an instant.

If you want to try something a little mind-boggling, try pretending that you are reading. Don't actually read, just look at words on a page and move your eyes over them from left to right as if you really are reading. If you did it the way I did, you might have found that the movement felt really unnatural and fake. Your eye movement is much too smooth and fast. That isn't what your eyes feel like when they really read. I thought that was interesting.

"Experience came to me first through books. when later in life I came across an event or circumstance or character similar to one I had read about, it usually had the slightly startling but disappointing feeling of deja vu, because I imagined that what was now taking place had already happened to me in words"
- Manguel pg 8

This particular passage really stuck out to me, because I have experiences similar situations where something I had once read about, and not fully understood at the time, seemed to fall flat once I had actually experienced it for myself. Manguel goes on to say that although he had never tasted Jelly, he had read about it before, but once he actually tasted it he was disappointed because it was not nearly as magnificent as he had been lead to beleive. One of the first exampled of this that comes to mind is actually Harry Potter.

The summer before my first year of college I was ecstatic about the idea of going off and living on my own. I imagined that I would make friends and have all these awesome adventures away from my parents and that I would become unimaginably immersed in culture and learning. My first year of college did not go like that at all. I discovered that the major I had chosen was not only fairly useless in the real world but also that most of my classmates (and professors) were arrogant and cocky. I didn't have a car and as a result I spent most of my time in the dining hall instead of having all of the marvolous adventures I had dreamt up for myself. I developed severe depression as a result of both the dramatic change of suddenly living on my own with a roommate who was a horror in and of herself, and at my despair that all of my visions of an exciting and carefree college life had been dashed.

I was clearly enamoured by the whimsical world J K Rowling had illustrated to me through her words. I mean obviously I wasn't expecting magic or wizards or quidditch, but I certainly was not expecting to end up running back home to my parents because I hated my major and dorm rooms are ridiculously expensive.

New semester