Reading in Public No. 50: The essential framework I use to move from reading to analysis

How one small perspective shift vastly opened up my reading life

This is Reading in Public’s 50th edition! I am so proud of this little Substack series. In the year plus that I’ve been writing these posts, they have become my favorites to compose and have kept me feeling creative, engaged, and fulfilled. As much as I love sharing what I read, sharing how I read is much more fascinating to me. Even better are the conversations it has opened up about how you read. Because—take it from an English teacher—there is no one right way to read a book.

Today, in honor of this 50th edition and to practice getting out of my own way, I’m going to share the one small mindset shift that (I think) has made me a better reader. If not better, it has at least made reading deeper and more meaningful for me personally. This mindset is something I allude to regularly in this series and something I have talked about more directly in my Book Club, but I’ve never written a full post about it. Why? Because I’m honestly embarrassed it took me so long to arrive at this place in my reading and I assume everyone already knows this!

But today I’m sharing because Reading in Public is not at its heart an instructive project. This series is not about me telling you how you should read, it’s about me showing you how I read—not because it’s right but because I think it’s interesting to articulate and make visible the things that happen inside our heads when we engage in our favorite pursuit. With that in mind, I decided it was finally time to write about my overarching reading mindset.

Here it is…

I consider every aspect of a book as an authorial choice.

Simple, right? Basic, maybe? But I went through all of high school and college and got into a pretty good graduate program in English Literature without ever having this idea front of mind. I analyzed texts well; I wrote interesting and insightful essays. I must have been on some level conscious of this idea, but it wasn’t until a graduate level rhetoric class that this concept clicked into place and lit up every aspect of my reading life.

Ted Chiang wrote about this idea beautifully in his incredible essay on why AI won’t ever make art:

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices.

Art is a series of choices and when we read a book deeply, we can (if we choose) consider every single word on the page a choice by the author. This mindset then allows—even encourages—us to act about the greater effect of those choices.

If this type of framework gives you flashbacks to times you were told by English teachers that your interpretations of the rose bush outside the jail in The Scarlet Letter or the green light in The Great Gatsby “really mean,” let me try reframing it. Considering an author’s choices is not the same as suggesting that everything novels are ciphers that need to be decoded. I actually find this mindset to be rather freeing. It offers me a different way to think about analysis where not everything is intentional in that everything has meaning, but that individual choices add up to shape meaning and considering those choices can help us make meaning of our own.

When I’m reading a book with this idea front of mind, I like to play the “what if” game. If every aspect of a text is a choice, then the author is not only choosing what I see in front of me, but deliberately not choosing all other available options. What if they had chosen this word instead of that word? What if they had set the book here instead of there? What if the characters had done this instead of that? Playing the “what if” game allows me to more clearly see what effect an authorial choice has by comparing it to the effect an alternative choice could have had.

I used to use a very basic and fairly obvious hypothetical example of this when teaching high schoolers. I would ask them to imagine the love interests from a nonexistent novel meeting for the first time in the book. They see each other first at sunset, I’d tell them. Now imagine if the author describes that sunset as “scarlet,” now changed that “rose red,” now change that to “blood red.” How would each of these choices impact your interpretation of the scene. There aren’t right answers in this exercise, but you can see how even with keeping the basic image of a red sky at sunset you can alter the mood of a scene or even foreshadow what might come later.

Using this framework, we’d imagine how our understanding of Jay Gatsby would be different if his hands reaching towards the green light were steady, or even shaking, and not “trembling.” We’d consider how the tone of In Cold Blood would be different if Capote had chosen to describe the sky as wide instead of “hard.” We’d consider how the prominent themes of My Antonia might change if the novel was told in third person instead of first. We’d do this over and over because it can be really challenging to determine what effect an artistic choice has on a piece of writing if you don’t have an alternative to compare it to!

Of course I don’t do this for every component of a novel, especially now that I’m not writing massive papers about the books I read. But I always have this framework in mind when I read and it moves more noticeably into my consciousness whenever an author’s choice feels particularly, well…choicey. Anytime I think to myself, Well, that was a choice, my internal dialogue responds, yes, it was. And how is this choice impacting the novel differently than any other choice would? This question always helps me get more out of a book and often helps me appreciate booksI might not otherwise.

Are there complications, caveats, and exceptions to this? Of course! Nothing is quite this simple. Still, I agree with Ted Chiang’s generalization that art is comprised of a series of many many choices. Even more than agreeing, I find this generalization to be a useful framework for approaching a book. And my follow up would be that analysis, then, is a conscious consideration of the cumulative effect those choices have on any piece of work. Which is exactly how I like to read.

Read More Like This:

Reading in Public No. 47: The return of magnificent rhetoric

Reading in Public No. 45: What do you do when you don't like something in a book?

Reading in Public No. 41: Thirty things good readers do

Reading in Public No. 40: My complicated thoughts on DNFing

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-Sara