How You Read

I remember engaging in "active reading" in another one of Professor Corrigan's classes, English Composition II.  I suppose you could say that that was my preliminary knowledge about this essay.  I thoroughly agree with the concept of engaging with the text, although it was somewhat foreign to me at first.  I think my favorite part of this essay was this paragraph: "Since you, the reader, are just feeling your way around the material, you cannot expect to take much meaning from it at first.  You and the author do not know each other yet.  You might consider the analogy of a couple's first meeting on a blind date, or of college roommates meeting for the first time."  This essay suggests that, just like a relationship with a person, we give our relationship with the literature time to settle in and grow.  It reminds me of a certain music theory lecture.  My professor used a play on words as he was talking about "engaging with a piece".  If you were really engaged to a person, he said, you would be excited to learn all of the details about them.  You wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm kind-of tired today, and I'm not really concerned about you and all of your details."  Often I've judged a piece of music as boring or irrelevant to me, but when I hear it many times and come to expect certain sounds, the overall meaning sinks in and I can relate to it.  (It may even become one of my favorites.)  The same applies to literature - until you learn the details, you don't really know it.  And we can't really judge something, or someone, we don't know.
    "What you get out of what you read is determined by how you read."  This sentence means more than one thing to me.  We have already discussed how our life experiences impact "how" we read something, that is, what message we interpret and how we think it applies to us.  What you get out of what you read depends on how you go about reading as well, like the active, annotated reading this essay describes.  By paying close attention to the details, we can get to know an author or a piece of literature.  Who knows?  They might even become our best friend.
  

Meet one of my best friends!