What does Nabokov think makes a good reader? Do you agree?
What do you believe are the characteristics of a good reader? Do you consider
yourself a good reader?
What
makes a good reader? This is not a question I have asked or given a moment of
thought to. I know how to decipher the text on the page and I understand most
of the stories I have read. Nabokov has tried to answer this question in “Good
Readers and Good Writers”. He has a list of ten definitions that he asked
students to choose four of. The four
definitions he suggests have to do with memory, imagination, artistic sense and
a dictionary.
I can
understand how a dictionary and good memory might come in handy, but do you
need an imagination or artistic sense to be a good reader? Artistic sense is
such a wide and varied thing from person to person. Knowing what you like and
what you don’t is what I think of when I hear ‘artistic sense’. Maybe I should
look it up in the required good reader dictionary. On the other hand imagination
is something I always thought of as the ability to materialize things from
nothing. Nabokov uses the word ‘enchanter’ to describe a good writer. If a
reader has a good imagination would this make them a conjurer with the ability
to release whatever enchantment the writer has laid down on the pages?
I
really don’t consider myself a good reader. I am not swimming in a pile of
books at the moment, I don’t have a library card and I haven’t read many of the
books considered classics. But according to Nabokov I have all the right stuff
except for that pesky dictionary.
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