I gave my book group a pop quiz. It's never been done in the history of this book group, which is a long and storied group indeed, but they took to it quite well. (Question 3 -- True or False: "There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried.") We read The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch. It's a complicated book, and good, good, good. But it's hard. This is the biggest breakthrough I have had in my Year of Planned Reading. Knowing that I have plenty of time to read, I am less headlong and impatient about my reading. It doesn't seem crazy to read a book twice. In fact, it seems necessary.
In How to Read a Book, Adler and Doren recommend that. They say, read it through the first time to get the gist. Skim it, really. Notice what you understand and what you don't. Then go through again and read it for real. Your second reading will be better because you understand what the whole is, and you have a sense of what you missed in the first pass, so you can focus on that and incorporate it into the whole. This makes so much sense! I have been a lazy reader for a long time. Lazy? Well, more like, impatient, dashing through books and carrying away only my hasty impressions. Worse, I have often blamed the author. If an ending was ambiguous, or I didn't fully understand something, I blamed the author for being unclear, even though I hadn't done any work at all.
Not that I'm fully reformed, yet. But it is great to have permission to read a book twice. They say that any book that's worthwhile is worth that attention, and of course, any book that isn't worthwhile, there's no harm in just skimming it and abandoning it after that cursory read. It's starting to make sense, a more deliberate approach.
Anyway, Iris Murdoch has now been responsible for two complex, exciting, and mysterious books, and it's nice to know there is a whole shelf full of others that I've not yet read. The Black Prince is a book I didn't understand when I closed the cover the first time. I'm not sure I fully understand it now, although after writing the pop quiz and arguing about it with the supersmart ladies of my book group I am closer.
Here's the pop quiz, in case you want to play along at home. Nobody got a hundred, not even me. Download Book Group Pop Quiz