How Should One Read a Book? by Virginia Woolf Review

I’ve never really “got” Virginia Woolf. I read Mrs Dalloway around about the time The Hours, that Nicole Kidman movie, came out and wasn’t that impressed with it - it’s about a lot of rather dull upper-middle class people having tea and a soldier suffering from PTSD. The praise for Woolf seems to be more of her stream-of-consciousness style rather than the substance of what she wrote.

So it goes with her essay How Should One Read a Book? which is as underwhelmingly insubstantial as anything I’ve read by her before. She poses a rather pointless question and provides an obvious answer: for enjoyment, basically. There isn’t a lot here that I disagree with but everything Woolf talks about is so self-evident to anyone who’s ever thought passingly about reading that it seems bizarre that any of it needed to be articulated at all.

For example:

- A great writer transports the reader to another world with their words and characters, as well as introduces new experiences and new ways of thinking by seeing through others’ eyes.

- Thinking about a book after you’ve finished reading it is different from the experience of reading it because so many details are missing and what’s left behind are scraps of the whole.

- We should read with an open mind and read widely - not just the acknowledged classics (and Woolf quotes all the bland, safe choices, eg. Shakespeare, Austen, Hardy) but also the ones that don’t stand the test of time, the books Woolf rather snobbishly labels “rubbish-reading”, if only to see different perspectives from different times and pick up occasional forgotten syntax from back then.

- Though professional book critics have their place, ordinary readers should not let them make up their minds for them - if you like a book, then that’s all that matters. Similarly, writers should bear ordinary readers in mind rather than let critics’ views colour their perception of a book’s response.

Is any of this blowing anyone’s mind?? I always try to keep in mind the context but I’ve got to think that even in 1926, when this essay first appeared as a speech Woolf gave, this stuff can’t have been the least bit remarkable to hear.

Sheila Heti contributes an intro and outro to the essay, probably to beef up the slight book, and doesn’t really offer up much beyond saying that she sends her friends drafts of her novels and that reading drafts is different from reading finished books. So there’s that I guess: how one should read a draft is with kindness more than anything. Great…

Reading, for Virginia Woolf, was heavenly, as it is for me and I’m certain for many others, you included, but reading her specifically is not. If you’re after a lot of elementary observations confirming your bias for reading, look no further than this tedious essay!