# Do you read sequentially?



## JustRob (Jan 18, 2017)

*We (There must be at least one other apart from me.) have decided that this forum is as much for discussing matters relating to the whole process of reading, and in general the thoughts that go through a reader's mind when they do, as it is for the more immediate task of beta reading any specific work, so this is a sample thread directed at members purely as readers outside of any other context. Hopefully such discussions will give our writers useful insight into exactly what they are up against and show how varied readers can be.
*


Jay Greenstein said:


> The printed word is a serial medium, where you can only present one thing at a time.



Jay stated this on another thread when-two-characters-talk-over-each-other-at-the-same-time and I was inclined to agree there as a writer, but is it really true? Writers may think about many things at once and then have to merge them into a single stream of words on the page, but as a reader do you actually read them like that? Does a writer really have to present ideas in precisely the right order or do we, as readers, gather the information from the words and assemble it into perceptions in our minds only as they become evident?

In my working life I have had to look up information in many large reference manuals that I have never read from beginning to end and therefore I have developed a style of reading which is definitely not sequential. I had to flick through many pages scanning the text quickly for words relevant to the subject in which I was interested. Consequently my way of reading a novel is now no different. When I see a page of text I may notionally be reading the top lines of it but I will already know about a spelling error at the bottom. I am aware that my eyes repetitively scan the whole page and my brain assesses its structure in terms of paragraphs and such before I "see" any words. I most probably will also notice key words like the names of characters, so I already know who is mentioned on the page before reading it sequentially. In fact I think I acquire most of the information on the page by systematically scanning the text over and over again rather than sequentially and the final sequential read-through is something that I do very rapidly just to check that I haven't missed anything of vital importance. 

I do not do these things consciously but only know about them through experience. For example, I may skip over a whole page without reading it in the normal sense because I know that it is describing things that to my mind don't add anything to the story that I want to read. Sometimes my attention slips badly and I have occasionally had to go back several pages when I've realised that I've entirely missed something significant, but even rereading several pages is simply part of my erratic process. Therefore for me as a reader what Jay claimed isn't strictly true.

It may well be true that many people do read strictly sequentially word by word just as the writer expected, but just how important is the exact order of the words and sentences on the page to you as a reader, or have you never given the matter any thought? In the wider sense then, how much of your reading experience is created by the writer and how much by your own mind? Is your reading itself actually a creative process simply guided by the writer's words as they tumble into your brain?


----------



## The Fantastical (Jan 18, 2017)

I am with you that we need to talk more about the reading side of things. I think that it is very easy to get caught up in the hype of writing and forget the propose of why you are writing. AKA so that someone can read it. 

I don't read sequentially either. When ever I turn to a new page I always take a second to scan it, see whos who and the shape of things. If I am not liking the whole of a book or a certain character I feel no shame in scanning whole chapters, just to get the gist of a story and move onto a more interesting place in the book.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 18, 2017)

The Fantastical said:


> I don't read sequentially either. When ever I turn to a new page I always take a second to scan it, see whos who and the shape of things. If I am not liking the whole of a book or a certain character I feel no shame in scanning whole chapters, just to get the gist of a story and move onto a more interesting place in the book.



I do exactly the same thing. A soon as we look at a new page we consider whether it contains text or pictures, mathematical equations or words using alien alphabets like Greek or Cyrillic. We notice not just large blocks of such but even small fragments, odd words or numbers where we expect to see uniform English text. In my case I even notice words that aren't recognisable, maybe because they have been spelled wrongly or are simply not in my vocabulary. We all have to do this to get our bearings on the page. 

Books have page numbers but we don't read them all, do we? We must see them and choose to ignore them without even thinking about it. In fact we need those blocks of text to be broken up, which is why writers use paragraphs, hopefully intelligently. If we were simply reading sequentially paragraph breaks wouldn't be so significant and the special paragraph symbol (¶) would suffice.

The truth is that acquiring information by reading is a sophisticated process nowadays. Hypertext was developed to enable many separate threads of text to be linked together logically rather than presented purely sequentially and we now use it throughout the World Wide Web as the standard form. We have become accustomed to jumping around blocks of text to collect the information that we seek. To say that this approach only applies to information-seeking tasks and not recreational reading is an oversimplification. We are what we are now and our reading needs may have evolved beyond the traditional view as a consequence. 

If electronic books become the norm eventually, then hypertext within them might become a reality. It effectively is in some places, even on the printed page. I have played with those RPG single player books where one decides where to go in the text next, maybe on the roll of a dice, and experiences one's own personal version of the story. That sort of thing isn't what I was referring to here but even in a conventional novel the writer can't be sure that the reader will play by his rules and read the words strictly sequentially. Some will already have read the last page even before they bought the book for their own strange reasons. 

The writer is only guiding the reader through the story to my mind and he has to decide how tightly he needs to hold the rein. The reader should have the freedom to use their own imagination but not to the extent that they go off at a tangent and lose the thread. 

I am in my seventies, so hardly on the leading edge of current human evolution and yet I think like this. My angel and I watched a black and white film the other day. We felt that that medium was ideal to create the right atmosphere. I've heard that some young people can't comprehend visual images without colour because such things don't relate to their perception of reality. How well does strictly linear text in a novel then? Are writers creating works for more primitive readers than us, or at least worrying about details that really don't matter to us any more?


----------



## EmmaSohan (Jan 18, 2017)

I was bugged by the sentence:


> Sheflew out to Cleveland from Kennedy, and picked up her rental car.



There's a lot not to like about that sentence, but one is three events ordered as Cleveland, Kennedy, and rental car. But they didn't happen in that order. I don't know how I am supposed to read that except as first imagining her landing in Cleveland, then imagine her taking off from Kennedy.
So I guess I am sequential.

In my writing I strongly prefer "I managed to read for 3 minutes before getting caught" over " before getting caught I managed to read for 3 minutes"


----------



## JustRob (Jan 18, 2017)

EmmaSohan said:


> I was bugged by the sentence:
> 
> 
> 
> > She flew out to Cleveland from Kennedy, and picked up her rental car.



If you feel the need to treat it strictly chronologically then maybe you have to assume that "to" means "towards" and she was still in the air when she picked up the car. I imagined a large cargo-carrying helicopter with a hook hanging from it as though in some film stunt. However, I am so sensitive to such ambiguities in prose that I doubt that any could be written without it having some alternative interpretation. As a reader I regard these alternatives just as noise in my head and usually choose the one best suited to the context in order to follow the writer's meaning rather than what they literally stated. 

If you can suggest a better way of writing something you evidently understand the intended meaning but just choose to deny the fact. Can you honestly say that this sentence had you confused because it had two equally possible meanings or is it just that your mental autocorrection of it made you feel uncomfortable about it? You recognised that the events were out of order but accepted that, put them in the right order and then felt cheated for having to do the writer's work for them. A reader fully engrossed in the story would be more likely to accept the intended meaning and move on so long as there was still on balance a benefit to be gained, wouldn't they? 

This is the difference between reading as a reader and as a writer. The writer feels that the text ought to be corrected while the reader accepts that it is too late for that to happen as it is all in the past. When a writer writes in the past tense the writing itself is not past, but to the reader it is unless the writer is actually asking pen in hand for suggestions on improving it while the ink is still wet. That's why beta reading is an oddity.

With your second example "I managed to read for 3 minutes before getting caught," I wonder why you feel the need to include the superfluous word "before" in it if all events in what you read are by definition strictly chronological. Shouldn't it read "I managed to read for 3 minutes, then got caught," if the catching cannot be mentioned at all until it happens? I assume that the catching took place then as otherwise it would have read "I managed to read for 3 minutes without getting caught." Presumably it doesn't matter when one mentions something that doesn't happen. 



> Yesterday, upon the stair,
> I met a man who wasn't there.
> He wasn't there again today,
> I wish, I wish he'd go away.
> (William Hughes Mearns)



This poem doesn't actually mention whether "I" met the man again today though, which is what makes it amusing, the fact that the words seem to imply that without actually stating it. Reading it literally I personally do not assume that "I" was on the stair at all today but that maybe "I" heard about it from someone else. In other words there is the ghost of a fact there without any substance to it, i.e. hearsay, the poem itself being about a ghost, as it happens. The reader hears something that the writer didn't actually say. But I digress.

To regress, would you feel upset by "I met a man today. I also met him yesterday as it happens," because the events are out of sequence and not "as it happens" at all? 

This is all about the way that sentences are set out internally though, which is the lowest level of resolution of the meaning, while in my OP I tackled the subject from the top down, considering what we do when confronted by a page of text in which each individual sentence may be impeccably chronological internally. Under those circumstances are you sure that you read purely sequentially or is your eye somehow drawn to the one sentence on the page which will bug you when you get to it because it isn't internally chronological, just as mine is towards the one spelling error or Greek word long before I consciously read it? (I didn't study Greek at school, only Latin, so such words are a meaningless blur to me.) Knowing you Emma, even just a little, I suspect that your keen forward-looking grammatical radar is alerted long before you mow your way through the text sequentially, but maybe I'm wrong.


----------



## The Fantastical (Jan 19, 2017)

JustRob said:


> If electronic books become the norm eventually, then hypertext within them might become a reality. It effectively is in some places, even on the printed page. I have played with those RPG single player books where one decides where to go in the text next, maybe on the roll of a dice, and experiences one's own personal version of the story. That sort of thing isn't what I was referring to here but even in a conventional novel the writer can't be sure that the reader will play by his rules and read the words strictly sequentially. Some will already have read the last page even before they bought the book for their own strange reasons.
> 
> The writer is only guiding the reader through the story to my mind and he has to decide how tightly he needs to hold the rein. The reader should have the freedom to use their own imagination but not to the extent that they go off at a tangent and lose the thread.
> 
> I am in my seventies, so hardly on the leading edge of current human evolution and yet I think like this. My angel and I watched a black and white film the other day. We felt that that medium was ideal to create the right atmosphere. I've heard that some young people can't comprehend visual images without colour because such things don't relate to their perception of reality. How well does strictly linear text in a novel then? Are writers creating works for more primitive readers than us, or at least worrying about details that really don't matter to us any more?



I have to admit to being a last page reader... I do it around the half way mark, either so that I can know that my fav character wins the day or to just see if the ending is worth it. 

I agree with you on the fact that the author is just a guide, but I think the authors have become afraid of their readers imaginations. They leave little room these days for the reader to take something personal away from their books. They hold on so tightly to "their vision" that they don't realize that they are crushing out the point of reading. The ability to exercise the mind a little.   

I think that the problem (if there is one) with reading sequentially is the fact that a large part of understanding many languages is the use of context and the context of a sentence isn't always the first thing that comes up. It can be the last thing and often is. You need to have the mental muscle to take a bit of information from this part of the paragraph and use it to understand the whole of the meaning. 

It is interesting what you have said about some people not being able to process B&W movies. The ability to have a flexible mind and be able to put things into context on your own is an important skill and I wonder if this isn't why I don't like modern books much. Plots just seem to have gotten simpler and it feels to me like authors are just handing me all the information all neatly ready for me with a bow on. There isn't any need for me to try and figure out whodunit... they tell me in the first three pages. Which is mildly exasperating! 

Same goes for movies... at one point you didn't know what was what until "THE  END" rolled across the screen, now it feels like they feel the need to tell you everything in the first five minutes so that the viewer can "know whats happening". Instead of letting the reader use their minds a little.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 19, 2017)

I agree very much about writers not giving the reader enough leeway. When I wrote a novel I did it as a reader who enjoys the freedom of using my own imagination when I read, so the novel has many different ways of viewing what it appears to say. The fact that I have read it many times myself just for the pleasure of finding yet another interpretation proves to me that I met my objective.

Regarding the order in which information is presented, although I didn't learn Greek at school I did learn German and there are jokes about the fact that in that language the verb is often the last word in a sentence. Inevitably there is a reference to this in my novel, which is a compendium of all the issues encountered in writing apparently. Here's the relevant extract.




> The minister had an annoying habit of leaving a silent gap before the last word of every sentence. Most politicians contrived to keep making some sort of noise almost perpetually, just to avoid interruptions, but the minister’s approach kept people listening just as effectively. One felt that he was considering something to add every time. He was also a master at keeping the most significant word until last. It occurred to Adrian that this habit couldn’t be any more annoying if they spoke German.
> 
> ‘What is your – status?’ the minister asked.
> 
> ...



I previously mentioned the possibility of finding a picture or text when we turn the page in a book and mentally adjusting to the discovery, but perhaps the telling situation is when we find a map. We "look at" a picture but we "read" a map. Some people are better at it than others. Perhaps it's maps that identify which type of reader a person is. The creator of the map has no idea exactly how the reader will read it and it doesn't matter. Some readers evidently treat the map as a picture and allow their brains to perform pattern matching to identify prominent features, symbols and words. Other readers seem quite befuddled by maps, maybe because they need to read them sequentially until they find the detail that they are seeking. I suspect that accomplished map readers treat pages of text in the same way and don't rely entirely on sequential reading. The result is a strange amalgam of techniques involving both sequential processes and overall visual symbol detection.



EmmaSohan said:


> I was bugged by the sentence:



That's an interesting remark as animals like frogs and lizards have "bug detectors" in their brains which identify small things upon which they can feed. I suspect that you have developed your own "bug detectors" which pick out flaws in text upon which your mind can feed and that this capability isn't necessarily part of your sequential reading. Again, I may be wrong about you though.


----------



## The Fantastical (Jan 19, 2017)

JustRob said:


> I agree very much about writers not giving the reader enough leeway. When I wrote a novel I did it as a reader who enjoys the freedom of using my own imagination when I read, so the novel has many different ways of viewing what it appears to say. The fact that I have read it many times myself just for the pleasure of finding yet another interpretation proves to me that I met my objective.
> 
> Regarding the order in which information is presented, although I didn't learn Greek at school I did learn German and there are jokes about the fact that in that language the verb is often the last word in a sentence. Inevitably there is a reference to this in my novel, which is a compendium of all the issues encountered in writing apparently. Here's the relevant extract.



Exactly my point!  It is an important ability to adapt and to (in the context of your minister there) think a little ahead! 



JustRob said:


> I previously mentioned the possibility of finding a picture or text when we turn the page in a book and mentally adjusting to the discovery, but perhaps the telling situation is when we find a map. We "look at" a picture but we "read" a map. Some people are better at it than others. Perhaps it's maps that identify which type of reader a person is. The creator of the map has no idea exactly how the reader will read it and it doesn't matter. Some readers evidently treat the map as a picture and allow their brains to perform pattern matching to identify prominent features, symbols and words. Other readers seem quite befuddled by maps, maybe because they need to read them sequentially until they find the detail that they are seeking. I suspect that accomplished map readers treat pages of text in the same way and don't rely entirely on sequential reading. The result is a strange amalgam of techniques involving both sequential processes and overall visual symbol detection.



A interesting subject, but it has brought to mind a question.. Do sequential readers do/like word searches? I think that scanning a map for a land mark or a place name is a lot like searching out a word in a word search. You have to have the whole and the individual in mind at once, as well as the open "seeing" of looking for something. 



JustRob said:


> That's an interesting remark as animals like frogs and lizards have "bug detectors" in their brains which identify small things upon which they can feed. I suspect that you have developed your own "bug detectors" which pick out flaws in text upon which your mind can feed and that this capability isn't necessarily part of your sequential reading. Again, I may be wrong about you though.



I don't know if I have a "bug detector" but I do have a "++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start." Error. Oh and the +"++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++". Both of these are triggered by Idiots or Dark/Grimdark Fantasy Nuts. lol


----------



## Sam (Jan 19, 2017)

I write a story. 

As simple as that sounds, it's no less true. It's not my business how the reader reads it, takes it, or infers what I was trying to say. That's their business. If they want to read Chapter Fifty before reading Chapter One, more power to them. It's no skin off my nose. 

As to how I read: I read from Chapter One to the end. I read each word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter in the order the writer intended them to be read. 

Why that would matter to anyone, or why it's of any consequence at all, I cannot say.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 19, 2017)

Sam said:


> As to how I read: I read from Chapter One to the end. I read each word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter in the order the writer intended them to be read.
> 
> Why that would matter to anyone, or why it's of any consequence at all, I cannot say.



A good writer caters for all types of reader. Here I wanted to draw attention to the fact that many types of reader exist. For a reader like me becoming a writer has an added dimension, that of catering for readers who don't read the way that I do. For example, because I "read" and interpret text in bulk rather than sequentially word counts don't matter much to me. As a consequence I can be equally verbose in my writing, which might put off some readers. Cran mentioned elsewhere that one should write what one would pay to read, but there's more to it than that. That's what makes beta readers so essential.

When I submitted a sample of my work to a professional reader (paid to read it) he commented that I "don't give the reader a chance." No doubt he meant the average reader. That's probably true. My own angel BlondeAverageReader doesn't read my work because it isn't her sort of thing. In contrast a lecturer in English literature at a university enjoyed my entire novel (without even being paid to read it) but said that it would probably have limited readership. 

I think it is worth considering our reading habits, both simply as readers and as potential writers. In the latter case how we write will be influenced significantly by how we read. I encouraged my angel to join WF as a beta reader because she is a typical reader, one who has more trouble reading maps than I do, especially in a moving car unfortunately. Her solution to that was to buy a satnav.


----------



## Sam (Jan 19, 2017)

JustRob said:


> A good writer caters for all types of reader.



No, a good writer writes a story that any reader can enjoy. 

If you're suggesting that a writer should cater to a reader of literary fiction when they, themselves, are writing for the sf market, then I have to tell you that that verges on the in(s)ane. 



> Here I wanted to draw attention to the fact that many types of reader exist.



Yes, I understand that sentiment. But if what you're saying is that I, as an writer of thrillers, should seek to cater for readers who enjoy science-fiction, I'm never going to agree with that. That doesn't mean that I don't read sf, or that I don't gain inspiration from its writers, but it does mean that I don't try to write for everyone. Not everyone likes thrillers. I understand that, accept it, and therefore I target people who do. 



> I think it is worth considering our reading habits, both simply as readers and as potential writers. In the latter case how we write will be influenced significantly by how we read. I encouraged my angel to join WF as a beta reader because she is a typical reader, one who has more trouble reading maps than I do, especially in a moving car unfortunately. Her solution to that was to buy a satnav.



If you can read maps in a moving car whilst being the driver, I'll accept your implied distaste for satnavs. 

But I imagine that you, Rob, as talented as you are, do not possess that ability. In which case, your angel was 100% correct in telling you to buy a satnav.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 19, 2017)

Sam said:


> No, a good writer writes a story that any reader can enjoy.



Some people regard reading the classics as masochism though, but then masochists apparently enjoy doing the things that they don't enjoy, or is it not doing the things that they would enjoy not enjoying if they did? I'm never sure.



> If you're suggesting that a writer should cater to a reader of literary fiction when they, themselves, are writing for the sf market, then I have to tell you that that verges on the in(s)ane.
> 
> Yes, I understand that sentiment. But if what you're saying is that I, as an writer of thrillers, should seek to cater for readers who enjoy science-fiction, I'm never going to agree with that. That doesn't mean that I don't read sf, or that I don't gain inspiration from its writers, but it does mean that I don't try to write for everyone. Not everyone likes thrillers. I understand that, accept it, and therefore I target people who do.



I think you've extended my comments about _how_ people read to _what genres _they read, which I never intended. Therefore I agree completely with what you say without it affecting what I did. On the other hand, readers assume that my novel is science fiction, but that genre is often used to create unusual contexts in which more fundamental philosophical issues can be addressed. I've never clearly understood what literary fiction is and some just regard it as an unnecessary form of snobbery, but it's out of my league either way. 



> If you can read maps in a moving car whilst being the driver, I'll accept your implied distaste for satnavs.
> 
> But I imagine that you, Rob, as talented as you are, do not possess that ability. In which case, your angel was 100% correct in telling you to buy a satnav.



No I can't both navigate and drive unless I memorise all the key directions beforehand, which I can do. That was the problem, that whenever we encountered a part of the route that was difficult to navigate she had to drive so that I could navigate, so she realised that I was getting all the easy driving while she got the more challenging stuff. There were occasions when we went the wrong way because I told her to turn left when I meant her to turn left of course, but they were infrequent. She also objected to me telling her to take a turn just as she passed it, but as an American tourist in Britain once told us "The trouble here is that by the time you know where you are you're somewhere else." Yeah okay, so it's a small country. No need to rub it in that it's more crowded than Texas (which may be understandable). We were in a taxi once and the driver was using his satnav on a unfamiliar road and turned left when it said in a female voice to turn right, so sexual equality rules there apparently.


----------



## EmmaSohan (Jan 19, 2017)

Not reading sequentially is impossible. At least for me. To imagine.

I even have the rule that you shouldn't finish a sentence until the reader can understand it. I hit a dead stop for:



> The air was cool and smelled of sun-dried leaves -- I assumed.



Yes, I figured that out eventually -- when I gave up and read the next sentence.

In my SePG, every phrase is supposed to make sense. That has sensitized me to how often we write phrases that cannot be understood until later. So, it a way, you are right -- modern English grammar sometimes does not expect us to process things sequentially.




JustRob said:


> If you feel the need to treat it strictly chronologically then maybe you have to assume that "to" means "towards" and she was still in the air when she picked up the car. I imagined a large cargo-carrying helicopter with a hook hanging from it as though in some film stunt. However, I am so sensitive to such ambiguities in prose that I doubt that any could be written without it having some alternative interpretation. As a reader I regard these alternatives just as noise in my head and usually choose the one best suited to the context in order to follow the writer's meaning rather than what they literally stated.



I disagree -- a goal in writing usually is to make things easy to read. To say the reader eventually got the correct meaning misses that point.

For several reasons, including to be a good editor of my own books, I stop when I am confused. Most readers do not. However, I have been surprised how often I misunderstood something I have read without noticing any problem.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 20, 2017)

EmmaSohan said:


> I disagree -- a goal in writing usually is to make things easy to read. To say the reader eventually got the correct meaning misses that point.



When I gave an extract from my novel to a professional reader for comment he told me that it was an easy read, but entirely missed the point! Evidently when a reader finds something easy to read they don't think about it so much. In that case shouldn't a writer make the task of reading a little harder to encourage the reader to exercise their mind more if the subject requires it? When a reader finds something hard to read they may decide that it is simply badly written or that it needs more thought than they have put into reading it so far. Whether they continue to read in the light of this depends on what they want to get out of reading. 

I suppose one could say that there is a granularity to text, i.e. the amount that one has to read at a time before it makes sense. With finely granulated text the impact and meaning of it is immediate but there is no after-effect; the reader knows what the writer has told them. With coarsely grained text the immediate impact may be confusion, curiosity or misconception and the realisation of what has actually been said may be delayed. I suspect that different readers have different tolerances to the length of such delays. The meaning of some of the things that I wrote in my novel don't become clear until twenty chapters later, which is admittedly taking things to extremes. They're more boulders than granules, but then maybe some readers like the challenge of rock-climbing.

I think this is a good analogy and at the heart of the question as to whether we read purely sequentially, but maybe the additional question should be whether we _comprehend_ what we read sequentially or not, regardless of how we read it. My own novel is like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces appear to the reader in a somewhat haphazard order. That is inevitable as it is about distortions in time and events which can never be seen purely chronologically. Some readers don't even like orderly flashbacks in a story and want everything to be presented chronologically. This attitude may be related to exactly how we build our perceptions of a story in our minds. Some readers may be better able to retain many fragments until they fit into the big picture while others may want to see that picture grow in their minds progressively. I think that may be the difference between readers who try to solve a mystery story as it is presented to them and those who simply follow it without trying to guess ahead about what may happen.

There is no right or wrong about how a writer should write or a reader read here, but it is clear that this granularity is a factor in matching writers to readers, so writers need to know just how tolerant readers are to it in general. 

The original thread that prompted my question was about two characters speaking simultaneously, something which cannot be presented in text purely chronologically. The potential solutions to that problem can still be regarded as a good test of a reader's tolerance to granularity in general.


----------



## EmmaSohan (Jan 20, 2017)

Maybe there are different issues here? One of the arguments against putting spaces between words was, I read, that reading should require thought and attention. My memory is that applied to the Bible. Apparently the value of making reading difficult did not win out for that.

If the epitome of easy reading is a simplicity of just a sequence of phrases (SePG) AND being grammatical, I find some authors at the opposite -- ungrammatical sentences that also do not follow simplicity. I assumed they were trying to win some literary prize or impress people, me being cynical I guess. But right, I concede that some authors deliberately write sentences that are difficult to understand.

What I call SePG, those simple phrases in order, works well when that's the content. For complicated ideas, it doesn't work so well. So you are right about that. However, when I have complicated ideas, I still try to make them as easy to understand as possible. The "difficulty" would probably come from me spending more words on the idea.

Writing a passage that gets reinterpreted is something else again. I just read _Code Name Verity_, where the second half changes how we understand the first half. But the first half was still really good at first reading. _Gold (Cleave) _has perhaps my favorite start, but we don't find out what's really happening until the end of the scene. So it has to be reread to really appreciate it. That's usually not going to happen, which is very unfortunate.


----------



## JustRob (Jan 20, 2017)

EmmaSohan said:


> Writing a passage that gets reinterpreted is something else again. I just read _Code Name Verity_, where the second half changes how we understand the first half. But the first half was still really good at first reading. _Gold (Cleave) _has perhaps my favorite start, but we don't find out what's really happening until the end of the scene. So it has to be reread to really appreciate it. That's usually not going to happen, which is very unfortunate.



Someone told me that Oscar Wilde said that a book isn't worth reading at all unless it is worth reading more than once, and that makes some sort of sense to me even though there is a paradox there as to how we know to read it the first time. Maybe Wilde was joking. I wouldn't know as I do not read so widely as many here evidently do. I did read _The Picture of Dorian Gray _as a remedy though. Maybe I should read it again ...

P.S.
Maybe I should also start a new thread "What persuades you to read a book a second time?"


----------

