Relating to the Material

Relating to the Material

In This Chapter

• Learning what to look for in the writing

• What the author expects from you

• Subjectivity, objectivity, and emotional involvement

• What history teaches us as readers?

In this chapter, we delve a little deeper into what you need to be looking for in literature in terms of expectations, emotions, and mood. You will begin by getting a better understanding of an author's intentions and figuring out your own expectations so that you will develop confidence in your conclusions.

Then, using references to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, you will learn about the complexities of a good piece of fiction and historical context. You will learn about how historical writings reflect societal development and what that means for you, the reader today.

What Does the Writing Mean to You?

As you become a more experienced reader, you will discover that people read differently. Obviously, by now you know we don't mean how you hold the book or position your elbows on the arms of your chair. Because we are all different people, we interpret the reading differently. What you interpret as one meaning, someone else may interpret as something else entirely. This is another reason it's nice to have an outlet, such as a book group, to talk about what you've read.

What the writing means to you has everything to do with who you are. And choosing any book, to begin with, has a great deal to do with what the writing will mean to you. You've chosen the book for a specific reason. It called out to you in some way and you were drawn to it.

The Task at Hand

Let's return to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a story about a woman accused of adultery in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. She is humiliated in front of her community by being forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her dress as punishment for her "crime."

What is interesting here is that because Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the nineteenth century, you have two questions to ask yourself in this reading: What was life like in the nineteenth century when the story was written, and what was life like in the seventeenth century, the time that Hawthorne is writing about? Your task is to try to understand how a nineteenth century writer might imagine life two centuries prior to his own. So you are actually reading a historical perspective of another historic time.

What Do You Expect?

As with any book, your reading experience will begin with interest and curiosity. Your first step when approaching a novel such as The Scarlet Letter should be to examine your own expectations of the topic itself. Based on what you already know about the story and based on what you have read of nineteenth-century western culture, what do you think Hawthorne will have to say about his character's situation? What kind of statement, if any, is Hawthorne trying to make about the moral issues of that society versus his own and how does that differ from the issues in your own society?

As a twenty-first-century mind (that's you), it might be difficult to picture that there's any huge difference between the two societies; but try to imagine two centuries prior to the times in which you live.

While you read The Scarlet Letter, for example, here is a list of questions you might keep in mind about our society's moral expectations of its citizens (and in turn, about your own moral expectations):

• In what way does religion play into the morals of American society?

• How are women treated compared to men when accused of committing adultery?

• How much say does our society and government have in our private and personal lives?

• Where do the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter get their moral code from, and does that kind of code exist in any part of American (or even world) cultures today?

• Can you compare Hester Prynne and Rev. Chillingworth to any modern-day heroes or victims, either literary or factual?

Now try replacing the questions regarding your society with nineteenth-century society—the time during which Hawthorne was writing. See how different your answers are and try comparing all three centuries and cultures (the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first). Obviously, this is where the research comes in!

After you read The Scarlet Letter, you will acquire meanings from the book based on your focus and expectations of the author. The outcome of this particular reading experience for you will be whether the author fiilfilled your expectations. Is this what you were looking for? If not, how was it different? Maybe the author exceeded your expectations. When that happens, it's always an adventure—and an exciting one at that!

Reader Response and Author Intention

Hawthorne has something to say, and it's up to you to figure out what it is by examining the life of the author himself. We won't keep you in suspense, and we'll even help you a little with your research here.

Hawthorne carried the tainted heritage of a hanging-judge uncle who sentenced many innocent women to die for all sorts of reasons—and ultimately condemned them for witchcraft, based on paranoia, irrational suspicion, and the fertile imaginations of people eager and swift to judge others. This should make you wonder (without even getting an answer to the question): Was this piece of writing by Hawthorne intended to be an act of reparation for his shameful relative's behavior back in the seventeenth century? Was there a thriving Puritan heritage calling out to the author? Or, more simply, maybe he just wondered what it was like to be alive back then. What did people think and feel? And what did the Puritans do to those who did not live by a standard moral code? What was the standard moral code, for that matter?

Like most fiction writers, Hawthorne drew from his own life and his own questions about life to create an imagined world that strives to answer many of these questions. These may be questions Hawthorne asked himself, and by writing the novel, questions he is asking you to consider as well. However, whatever answers you come up with are your own. There may be no one answer to these life issues in the end, but there certainly are your answers.

Hawthorne evoked his questions about life, and maybe even about his own ancestry, by humanizing history. He gave names to faces, feelings to characters, and description to places. This is what makes fiction. This is what teaches us. And this is how we grow.

The Scarlet Letter is charged with emotional and intellectual issues, making it a very good example of how literature can push you to look very closely at your own responses. Reading The Scarlet Letter will inevitably force you to contemplate your own code of ethics, your sense of morality, and the religious and spiritual influences in your life. How do you see the novel? How does it reflect what you believe or do not believe? How does it compare to the modern-day view of "morality" or "honor," for that matter? What is your opinion on adultery? Do you think Hester has done anything wrong? Is she a hero or a victim—or both? What kind of person do you think Hester is? What do you think of the outcome?

On the other hand, and maybe more importantly, what was Hawthorne trying to say to the reader?

Emotion Versus Subjectivity

We all have likes and dislikes as well as things we're just not so sure about. We have emotional responses to difficult as well as happy situations, to the people around us, and about ourselves. We are human beings with biases and prejudices, and we all have things that trigger our reactions. But to get

stuck in those emotional places leaves us at dead ends. It would be hard to read anything subjectively or objectively if you're stuck in certain emotional places.

If you can understand that, it will be easier for you to grasp the difference between emotional and subjective responses.

The Emotional Reader

An emotional response is often a knee-jerk reaction. It comes from the gut—it can happen in an instant and always speaks to how we feel in the immediate. In many ways, it speaks to our biases and things with which we are familiar. Sometimes the feelings don't hit us in the here and now, but when they do, they can often be powerful and eye opening.

For example, if you are reading a story about a mean dog that is shot by a member of an unsympathetic community, you could have one of two reactions: Maybe you're relieved because that dog was a total menace to society—in this case your bias may be in favor of society. On the other hand, the dog had been treated cruelly, so you sympathize with him and feel sad when he dies—then perhaps your bias is with the dog and against a conceivably uncaring society. Both are emotional responses.

A Subjective Perspective

Subjective responses are grounded more in the kind of person you have become to this point as opposed to what you feel at any given moment. From a subjective perspective, you bring your inner reality to your reading, which will either be expanded or more limited depending on what it is you choose to read.

You bring values and points of view of your own; they are all hopefully going to be challenged by the reading. That is usually what the author intends to do: challenge the norm and shake up the status quo.

In the case of the dog in the previous example, maybe you were the owner of a dog who had been cruelly treated by a group of local hooligans and as a result you have had to muzzle the dog and have people look at you and the dog with trepidation. To you it's a loving, friendly animal, much like your own dog, while to the rest of the world it's a monster. You cannot see the dog as just good or bad, you know that it's more complex than that. It is your own life experience that affects this read.

Intellectually Speaking

Intellectual response is geared toward bringing your analytical skills to bear on your reading. Reading intellectually will allow you to see the writing more objectively. Look objectively at how the author shapes his or her characters, develops the plot, or uses descriptions. What is the point of view? Who is telling the story? Does the narrator have an opinion about the events or about the characters? And what about the author? Why did he or she write the book in the first place? What does he or she want you to get out of it?

Okay, let's go back to that dog for a moment. Try thinking about it this way: "Personally, it troubles me that this society did not understand the dog, but objectively, I understand that they needed to get rid of the dog or face the loss of more human lives within the community."

Looking at the story from the dog's perspective, the owner's perspective, the community's perspective, and the individuals within the community and their various perspectives allows you to look at a situation—in real life or in a book—from an intellectual standpoint so that you can draw objective rather than subjective conclusions.

While you will find answers from your own reading of the material, you will also gain perspective from outside sources such as book reviews and literary criticism, which will also examine and interpret literature.

Although this will help you formulate some of your own questions, it is important that you not stray too far from yourself and your initial responses when you read the thoughts of others.

What About Those Gray Areas?

A subjective response to The Scarlet Letter may allow you to see that Hawthorne reveals not so much the opposites of good and evil as the shadowy in-between areas— the subtle, nuanced complexities that make it difficult to see things in extremes the way the Puritan community in The Scarlet Letter does. Maybe, for reasons in your own life, you have come to realize that life is all about the gray areas—the middle zone. Not everyone can be categorized as angelic or evil the way law and society may try to make things seem sometimes. So in the end your focus might actually be philosophical, ethical, or even theological.

If you are looking for an objective read of The Scarlet Letter, you need to keep your own opinions at bay as best you can and look strictly at the story, the characters, the themes, the symbols, and the author. This may be harder to do if the topic charges you and makes you feel strongly about your own ideology and philosophy of life. But that's all the more reason to try to see the story objectively.

Walking a Fine Line

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne provides insight into the battling forces of fear, ignorance, jealousy, revenge, suffering, redemption, and the transcendence of love by means of the characters in the book and the community in which they live. It's not like those attributes only apply to seventeenth- or nineteenth-century societies. Those are timeless topics that apply to human nature and society in general.

While you read The Scarlet Letter, do you feel sympathy for Hester? That's interesting if you were raised to believe that adultery is wrong, no matter what the circumstances. Let's say you hold firm to that belief. Does that mean everyone has to believe what you believe? Or does it mean people should be ostracized for not believing what you believe? Maybe you believe in the laws of society, no matter who the society is made up of, but somehow you feel that Hester wasn't wrong in breaking the laws of her own society. What does this say about you?

Now, you can see it—your world has turned upside down and sideways, and that's the whole point! That's what makes a good reader!

Putting Together the Pieces of the Puzzle

Your life and opinions aside, what does Hawthorne do to make his reader see the gray areas—the middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice? How does he show us that the power of love with a huge dose of strength of character can help transcend all adversity? By the use of symbolism and metaphor, the author gives us all the meanings, and like a puzzle it's up to you to put them together. Here are some examples of complex layers of symbolism and metaphor in The Scarlet Letter all relating to the letter A. One layer leads to a deeper layer not only within the story, but within the text, which helps us see what Hawthorne is trying to say:

• The letter A stands for adulteress, as the town sees Hester. Forcing Hester to embroider her own A, as though she is making her own prison uniform as punishment, actually allows her the freedom to make a statement.

• The letter A also stands for Arthur, the hidden first name of the father of the child—hidden because Hester keeps his identity a secret from the community to protect him.

• The letter A also comes to stand for angel, as Hester becomes a caretaker within her community, after she is let out of prison, bringing solace and help to those who need it.

• Angel also refers to the father of the child, Arthur (Dimmesdale), when Hawthorne tells us about him in the middle of the book: "... and thus kept himself simple and childlike; coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel."

Hawthorne is focused on that scarlet letter from many perspectives, as you can see, and along with  symbolism and metaphor, Hawthorne throws in a healthy dose of irony. That ever-present letter A is supposed to be a daily source of humiliation for Hester Prynne—a scourge on her soul—as she is forced to wear it. But instead she wears her A as though it is a medal of honor—her own private symbol of pride and

integrity as one who bears the punishment of the community but will not give them what they want.

The community in The Scarlet Letter wants Hester to publicly reveal the name of the father of her child. She refuses because he is a respected member of the community— the minister. To identify him to the public would destroy his life, her life, and the life of her child, and equally important to her, it would be bending to a rigid and restrictive society.

It is no shrinking, humiliating A that she wears as her community would like to believe. Splendidly embroidered by her own hands, the A has layered emotional and spiritual meanings for Hester having to do with her character and integrity, her world of private meanings, and an inner beauty and richness. Despite public humiliation, she proudly wears the first initial of the father's name. The symbolism of the way she

has embroidered it refers to her undying resolve. In the elaborate embroidery, she shouts in the face of her community that she has done nothing wrong. We look at symbolism and metaphor in greater detail in later Pages.

Hearing the Author Loud and Clear

Hawthorne speaks to us in parables about our very human nature—about the beauty, character, and strength of spirit within each individual as represented in the character of Hester Prynne. He looks at the  vulnerability and weakness of individuals in the character of Arthur Dimmesdale, and tells us about corrupted human nature in the character of Roger Chillingworth (Hester's estranged husband from the Netherlands).

The thread that binds the whole story, and perhaps the reader to the writing, is the wondrous power of love woven throughout the novel.

Writing and Societal Identity

Keeping all of this in mind regarding The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorne's own historical perspective on the society from which he and his family originated, it's important to understand where you have come from as well. As Americans, we all originally come from somewhere else. But American society as we know it today originates with the early colonists, and these are the times of which Hawthorne writes. To understand modern American society, you need to look at American history and culture and how it plays into your world and into your reading experiences.

Back to the Beginning

If you look at the United States, the process of shaping a national identity has been astonishing. The country started as a vast landscape of mountains, rivers, lakes, and trees, home to the Native Americans, who were storytellers but not writers. They had no printing presses to share their knowledge—it was all by word of mouth and works of art.

With the arrival of the Europeans in the seventeenth century, the society we have grown into today began. They changed the nation of the Native Americans into what was familiar to them—in terms of religion, law, and societal morality.

To understand the kind of society we are today, we should think back to the seventeenth century, specifically to Massachusetts Bay, where middle-class British subjects settled to build John Winthrop's "city upon a hill." In his famous emotional sermon to the colonists as they sailed to the new world, Winthrop, one of America's first Puritan settlers, told the weary travelers how they would be part of building a model Christian community. Based on education and good living far from the persecution of the Church of England against the Christian reformers, the Puritans would finally have the life of which they dreamed.

This sermon, which reflected Winthrop's principles and ideals, became the national metaphor that has inspired literary and political thought well into our times. Despite the desire for freedom from persecution, this was not a time of great liberal thinking. There were rules—lots of rules. In fact, the only writing that as allowed was letters, diaries, and pious sermons. But on the other hand, these were times of survival and hard work. Even storytelling was forbidden unless they were stories from the Bible.

History and Modern Thought

Who we are today stems from where we came from—who we were yesterday, so to speak. The only references we have for understanding this are the writings of the times. And as you can see, what happened in the seventeenth century was still affecting Nathaniel Hawthorne in the nineteenth century, and affects us today in the twenty-first century.

Historians say that to know your history is to learn from it, to be ignorant of it is at one's own peril. The same can be said of masterpieces of fiction. They don't only tell us who our cultural ancestors were, they tell us about who we are right now. So the thinking of one century to the next is witnessed mainly in the writings of the times.

By the twentieth century we had film and videotape to help us document our times so we now have a new way of looking at the past and the present, but there is no better keeper of history than the writings of its people.

The Least You Need to Know

• The author has something to communicate to the reader, and it's up to the reader to figure it out.

• There are different ways to look at a piece of writing, including objectively, subjectively, and emotionally.

• How you interpret literature has a great deal to do with who you are and what your life experiences have been.

• Authors use different techniques, including symbolism, metaphor, and irony, in an effort to reach the reader.

• The history of American society greatly influences who we are today as a nation and what we can expect and learn from our writers.

Developing the Critical Eye

Developing Your Critical Eye

In This Chapter

• What makes a work of fiction absorbing?

• Learning to read nonfictions

• Start asking (more) questions

• Uncovering author techniques

• Backing up your reading with even more reading and research

Reading is a growth experience. As you change, so do your reading tastes. Now that you've made the conscious decision to learn more, it is inevitable that you will start to look deeper into the literature you choose to read. But what exactly are you looking for?

There's the rub! It's simple, really; you're looking for connections in the text: between events, between thoughts, between ideas, between the author and his era, between the author and his readers ... and the list goes on. In this chapter, we take a deeper look at the techniques authors use to get their point(s) across, both in fiction and nonfiction.

What to Expect from Fiction

Let's begin with some definitions and some criteria. A work of fiction is a piece of imaginary prose that can be in the form of a novel, novella, or short story. A novel is a long work of fiction, whereas a novella is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. The writer of a piece of fiction may draw on his or her own experiences or imagination to create the story. What makes it fiction is that strictly speaking, it is made up—created out of the thoughts and feelings of the writer.

You should approach reading fiction as you might approach any adventure (such as a vacation, for example). Reading a work of fiction is like taking a trip to an unfamiliar location. You are entering a world of the unknown.

I Just Can't Put It Down!

As a reader, there's no better feeling than picking up a book that's so absorbing you can't put it down. Some book lovers will read very slowly to put off the inevitable end of a book. It's an amazing feeling when a book grabs you so completely that you find yourself walking down the street, book in hand, knocking into lampposts and fellow pedestrians. (Well, it might not be so amazing for those people you bump into!)

What is it that makes a particular piece of fiction so absorbing? Generally speaking, it's the element of surprise, the author's ability to tell the story in such a way that you just have to know more. You have a secret desire to skip ahead and find out what happens next (but resist the temptation to do that—you'll ruin the surprises along the way!).

The Able Author

A story should be interesting or funny enough to hold your interest and make you want to know more about what happens next. The author should care enough about his characters (or at least be involved enough) to make you care about them, too. The plot should flow and make connections between events, thoughts, and feelings as it moves along. It should contain the basic structure of rising action, climax, and falling action that leads to some kind of resolution.

Fiction is sometimes written strictly for entertainment purposes without expecting to teach you much of anything. Other times the author has a larger message that he depicts through allegory, a symbolic statement of an idea, philosophy, emotion or feeling, or all of those elements combined. We talk more about allegory in later pages What you should come away with by the time you close the book is a new perspective, a new insight into a universal theme. Isn't that what you expect from a vacation—to come back with new images and new ideas?

How to Read Fiction

You've already learned the basic structure of fiction. But what makes fiction different from any other form of writing, aside from the fact that it is imaginary?

In addition to identifying the structure of a piece of fiction, it's essential to ask yourself two questions as you read:

• Who is telling the story?

• How is it being told?

In answering these questions, you're identifying the narrative voice and the point of view. The narrative voice is the voice of the person telling the story (not to be confused with the author). Point of view determines how much the narrator knows and how the story is told. These concepts are discussed in detail in the next pages. For now, however, just be aware that the narrator has a great influence on how the story ultimately unfolds.

Accepting the Author's Choices

As the reader, try to begin every fiction reading experience with an open mind. Even if you don't necessarily learn something new, and even if you don't particularly like the book, authors are quite adept at depicting old ideas in completely new ways. The story line, the characters, the atmosphere, and the descriptions of a new book just might show you a different way of looking at things. The author's creative process helps you see things in new ways. The reader's creative process involves going along with the author for the ride.

I Don't Get It

If the author is successful in translating his or her ideas to you through the story, the author has done what he or she intended to do. If you walk away scratching your head, there could be one of two things going on: either the author failed to communicate with you, or you failed to grasp the intended meaning. Just as there are bad readers, there are bad writers. So don't jump to the conclusion that the inability to connect to the author or to the story is your fault. Sometimes it just happens.

Understanding Nonfiction

Now it's time to switch gears. Nonfiction is a completely different from fiction in form and style of writing. Rather than finding its origins strictly in imagination, nonfiction is based on facts. Whether it it's a how-to book, biography, autobiography, or a book about a specialty area such as physics or computers, the author's purpose is to convey information to you — real information in as "true" a form as possible.

When you pick up a nonfiction book, you are usually looking for specialized information, and the one thing you may demand of the writer is that he or she be clear. If the book is assigned to you for a class, you might have to trudge through difficult information to get to the root of what you need to learn; if it's a book of your choosing, however, the style of the writing and how the information is presented will be important in making your selection. Your choice of book has everything to do with your personal preferences.

Specialty Books

If you are choosing a book in an area of special study, clarity should be your first criteria.

Regina knows a person who recently lost her job and needed to update her computer knowledge and skills to find new employment. She took some computer classes, but, unfortunately, she couldn't keep up with the class because the teacher was racing through the material like he was trying to make the Guinness Book of World Records for speed teaching. So she went to a local bookstore to pick up additional texts that she could follow at her own pace.

Regina's friend knew that some of the material might be over her head and she would need a text that would start with the basics. What she found, to her surprise, was not so much that the books were over her head, but that many of them were disorganized and poorly written. She had to really look around before she found something she could follow and that would help her update her computer skills on her own. Although some of these how-to books may have appealed to one person, chances are there are a lot people like Regina's friend who would not have been able to follow these texts. The point is that the material must be clear, which means it must be organized in an easy-to-follow style, and it must be written so that a beginner can understand the content.

Who Is This Author, Anyway?

The second criteria for choosing nonfiction is to expect help from an author that goes beyond the style of writing. Check out the information on the back cover or inside the dust jacket, or look for a section called "About the Author." (In this book, the "About the Authors" section is on the inside back cover.) Knowing about the author's background and knowledge base will help you make your choice. If you are confident in the author's expertise in the subject, you may be more likely to want to read the book.

There may be other references in the book that will convince you that what you are reading is based on a solid knowledge base and therefore as accurate as you would expect a work of nonfiction to be. You may find a preface, introduction, glossary, bibliography, as well as footnotes and/or endnotes. The more information the book contains, the more credibility you are likely to feel it holds. (See Chapter 4 for more on how a book is structured.)

The reason for all of these extras is that the author wants to help you to understand the material more completely. It's important that the author add additional references and information to back up the text and to show you that he or she is a reliable source that you can count on for accurate information. The author also wants you to have the sources so that you can further your study of the topic. Just keep in mind that just because a book references many different sources and seems to have all the elements required of a work of nonfiction, the most important thing is that you understand the text.

Biographies

You have to be especially careful about whom the author of a biography is. (Remember, a biography is the story about someone's life told by someone other than the person who lived that life.) Who is telling the story exactly? A family member? A friend? A housekeeper? Or someone who simply has an interest in studying that person's life?

Is the person still alive? Is the author writing the life story from historical documentation or from eyewitness observation? You need to do your research before you accept a biography as fact.

Unauthorized biographies are written without the subject's consent or cooperation. Although these books claim to tell the true life story of someone, you really need to check out the author and his credentials before you can trust the story being told.

Usually, there's some hidden agenda involved in these books, whether it's money, revenge, or the author's quest for fame. So although you might enjoy these juicy reads, keep in mind these books should really be classified as entertainment.

Let's look at the one of the most notorious biographies, Mommie Dearest, about the life of the legendary screen actress Joan Crawford, star of many films from the 1920s through the 1970s. Mommie Dearest was a book before it hit the big screen in the early 1980s. As you may know, Joan Crawford was depicted in both the film and the biography as anything but a loving mother of her adopted children. In fact, she was portrayed as an obsessive-compulsive egomaniac who often used her children to show what a great benefactress she was. In the end, when she died, she left daughter

Christina absolutely nothing in her will.

Consider who the author of this biography is: Christina Crawford herself. Now ask yourself, was Christina trying to get in the last word as revenge against her mother's lack of generosity, or was she finally free to tell the world the truth about what went on behind the closed doors of Joan Crawford's "perfect" world? Was she trying to make her own name known? (She went on to publish a novel shortly after Mommie Dearest came out.) Mommie Dearest was published in 1978, a year after her mother's death. Did Joan Crawford know that her daughter was writing this book and subsequently cut her out of the will? No one can know the truth for sure.

In the case of Mommie Dearest, knowing the identity of the author is critical to being able to believe the content of the book. This is true for many biographies.

Autobiographies

Again, with autobiographies, it's important to consider who the author is. Obviously, because an autobiography is a book written about one's own life, you would expect it to be as close to the truth as possible. (This applies to memoirs as well, which tell of significant events in a person's life. Like an autobiography, a memoir is written by the person who experienced the life events.) Keep in mind that those who write a book about themselves believe they have something of interest to say. Anyone can write an autobiography, but readership will depend on the level of interest in that person, and the more interesting the story, the more likely it is that the book will sell well (and make the author oodles of money). Most autobiographies are written by someone in the public spotlight.

Sometimes writers of autobiographies feel they have something to explain about themselves. Perhaps a person believes he or she has been misunderstood by the public and writes a book to set the record straight. Maybe the author is a person who has been gossiped about and feels he or she needs to respond to some of the things that have been said. In some cases, autobiographies are written because the person just wants to be remembered from his or her own point of view rather than that of someone else or a collective audience.

Asking Questions and Finding Arguments

What fiction and nonfiction have in common is that you begin both reading experiences with a desire to know more. With a work of fiction, you have chosen to read it because, for some reason, the story appeals to your senses, or to your personality, or to your life circumstance at any given time. Maybe you picked it up because it had an interesting title or a pretty cover or because you enjoyed other books by that author. It doesn't matter why, really; what matters is that the book is in your hands and you're reading it. The same is true for nonfiction material. Something caught your attention, and now it's in your grasp or on your bookshelf.

What Do You Want to Know?

The most important thing is to start asking questions as soon as you develop the desire to know more about the topic. Suppose you have an interest in the war in Iraq and want to know more. Do you want to hear the answer from someone in the Bush administration or do you want to hear it from a political activist's point of view? What is it that you want to know? Are you looking for a reliable and informed viewpoint?

A scholarly viewpoint? Or a radical viewpoint? You don't even have the book in your hands yet, and you've already begun to ask yourself questions about what you want to read in regard to the topic. Maybe you're interested in furniture and want to learn how to build your own mahogany dining room set. Whose book will you read? One written by a professional furniture crafter or one written by a self-taught carpenter? Again, we get back to you and the kind of questions you bring to a subject and to an author. These will ultimately lead to whatever opinions and arguments (which support your opinions) you are going to develop. Not all works of nonfiction will lead you to forming such strong ideas, however. Sometimes a nonfiction book is just a book that will satisfy a curiosity you have. Maybe you want to know more about growing African violets. In that case, you'll pick up the book with the most appealing style. There's no need to form an opinion or an argument supporting the theory behind growing African violets. You will just want to satisfy a curiosity and learn something new.

On the other hand, you may have always wanted to read the Roosevelt-Churchill letters because you wanted to find out how these two heads of state dealt with World War II. These are actual letters, so what you see is what you get. There is no interpretation of the letters unless you dig deeper. You will likely find that many political historians have interpreted these letters in several different ways. But without any background material, you are left on your own to read and comprehend what these two men said to each other and how their words led to action that would affect the world from that point on.

It is inevitable that you will form questions as you read the letters. (Why didn't Roosevelt or Churchill see what Stalin was up to? Why didn't Roosevelt go to war sooner?) Your questions may not be answered by the letters themselves. You will either have to find the answers on your own through research or you will have to research what others have to say about the letters in order to formulate further opinion on the material. While you are reading, however, it is up to you to form your opinions, build your arguments, and develop your own interpretations. Sounds like some serious work, but this is exactly why you're reading in the first place.

When you are able to make up your own mind about the material, you will find new doors opening to you everywhere you turn in your reading experiences. This is why we call it a voyage of discovery. What you are discovering is what you believe and what you decide for yourself by means of reading the ideas and opinions of someone else.

Fact or Fiction?

With fiction, you know that what you're being told isn't being presented as true. When you read nonfiction, it's important to have a system of checks and balances so that you can stop and evaluate the author's point of view from time to time to determine whether he is being objective. Here are questions to consider as you read nonfiction:

• What are the facts being presented?

• How are they being presented? Are they clear and straightforward or muddled and perplexing?

• Is the author expressing an opinion? If so, what is it?

• How is he or she interpreting the facts?

• Do I see a particular bias or perspectives in the text?

• How does that perspective compare against what I already know or believe?

• Is this the first time I've read this point of view?

• Do I need to find further reading material to make up my mind about this author or the subject matter?

• Have I read enough about this topic to formulate my own arguments or do I need to do more research?

If you just accept the author as an authority on the topic and don't ask yourself questions such as these, you're not doing your job as an active reader or as a thinker. You should question everything that is stated as a fact. Question the point of view, research the background, and find your own answers. You may or may not come to the same conclusions as the authors. What is most important is that you have come to a conclusion that is your own—otherwise you might just be regurgitating someone else's biases or points of view.

Putting It All in Perspective

Who knew there was so much involved in reading? Not many of us, or we wouldn't need reference guides such as this one to help us along. There is so much more involved in reading than what you could possibly have learned in high school.

Now that you have all this information, it's time to make it work for you. Try following this simple list of questions (yes, more questions ...) to guide you in your reading. Some apply to fiction, some to nonfiction, and some to both:

• Based on what I know about it, why did I pick this book?

• Who is the narrator?

• What is the point of view?

• What is the author's point of view?

• What is the author trying to tell me?

• What is the theme?

• How does the author's opinion differ from what I already know and believe?

• What do I think about the story or book?

• How has this reading experience affected me?

So, What Do You Think?

This is the most important question of all, because that's the whole point, isn't it?

When all is said and done, what matters most is what you take away from the book.

The author's opinions and feelings are still out there waiting for another reader to interpret. Although two people may walk away with many of the same thoughts, their own experiences and personalities will make one reading experience different from the next.

If your curiosity leads you to further explorations, the books you are choosing and learning from are helping you to grow, be it in the area of politics, physics, or growing African violets. More than anything else, your reading experiences should make you a better you.

Drawing Conclusions

Be cautious when it comes to drawing conclusions. At best, you should draw only tentative conclusions, at least at first. No book can give you everything you want or need. There can be gaps in information or too much said about one topic and perhaps not enough about another. That's to be expected. The best you can do is pick up some information from a single text, which hopefully will lead you to formulate more questions that another author addresses in a different book.

Life is a never-ending process of learning. If you could pick up all the information you would ever need on a particular subject from one book, you would be all set. But that's not likely to happen. Even when an author is an expert in a given field, he will usually lean toward a preferred theory, which you may completely disagree with. It's up to you to find out about the other theories out there and then come to your own educated conclusion.

Your conclusions will be largely based on your expectations from a piece of writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And what you may be looking for can be found in pieces and parts of several different books. Be patient. Keep looking. Keep reading. There isn't any book that you pick up that you aren't going to get something out of, if, at least, it's written in an interesting and engaging way.

The Least You Need to Know

• Asking questions of yourself and of the author and his or her subject matter is the first step toward developing as a reader.

• Fiction and nonfiction differ in the questions that you ask yourself before, during, and after your reading experience.

• It is important to pay attention to an author's techniques and expertise. It is another way he or she is trying to communicate with the reader.

• Never take anything an author says at face value. Learn to recognize biases and opinions in yourself as well as in the author.

• Don't expect one book to be all things to all readers. It is almost always necessary to go looking for more information either about the author or about the subject matter.

Read the Cover Page

What's Between the Covers?

In This Chapter

• How the novel is structured

• Where to find clues about a book's content

• Examining nonfiction

• A close look at references and sources

• How a book "grabs" you and keeps you interested

How many times have you opened a book—any book—and skipped over the table of contents, the preface, and even the blurb on the back or on the inside dust-jacket flap? We all want to get right to the nitty-gritty, but it might pay to slow down a little and take your time with a book before you plunge in. Before you invest time and money in a book, it's important to know what you're about to read.

There are plenty of readers out there who have countless books on their bookshelves that sit unread because they weren't enjoying them after they brought them home. You should plan to check out the book thoroughly before you buy it to see whether it holds any interest for you. A good examination of a book can prevent this from happening to you and will even leave you some extra space on your bookshelf.

Inspecting Fiction

When you pick up a novel you have never read before, you really have no idea what to expect. But there are clues all over the book that can guide you. For example:

• Title and cover

• Table of contents

• Introduction and preface

• Structure and style

• Appendixes such as a bibliography, glossary, and footnotes or endnotes

When you're first examining a book, one of the first things you'll do is flip the book over and read the blurb on the back or open the book, in the case of most hardcover books, and read the inside flaps of the dust jacket. The back cover or inside flaps usually give you a quick summary of the book without giving the story away. They are written to pique a reader's interest. The back cover may also include a few lines from recent book reviews. But remember the reading material has to call out to you somehow. Reviewers and enticing blurbs aside, what you think is all that matters.

In the following sections, we take a tour of the parts of a book. If you're going to become a good reader, it's best to get acquainted with the basics of what you'll find inside the book.

Let Me Introduce You

When someone introduces you to a friend at a party, he or she will often disclose a few details about the person that will help you grasp who it is you are talking to. For example, you might be introduced to someone thusly: "This is my friend Jill. We were roommates at the University of British Columbia when I studied in Canada for a semester."

This introduction tells you about the relationship between Jill and the other person.

You know that they have maintained a relationship over the years and that Jill might be Canadian. So that information combined with what you already know gives you a starting point to launch a conversation. That's exactly what the introduction of a book can do for your reading experience. It can (and hopefully will) give you some of the information you need to decide whether you want to continue with the book.

Sometimes a book will be introduced by someone other than the author. If the book is in reprint, for example, or if the author is deceased, sometimes a scholar familiar with the writer or an editor who worked on the edition will write the introduction.

For a good analysis of the examination of a novel, let's take a look at some novels both old and new. You may have already read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which case you're one step ahead, but let's take more introductory look at this classic nineteenth-century novel. Published in 1850, it's about a woman accused of adultery in seventeenth-century Boston.

She is humiliated in front of her community by being forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her clothing.

The Scarlet Letter has one of the longest introductions of any piece of fiction, and it is extremely important that you read it to get a full understanding of the novel.

Hawthorne explains what led him to write the novel in the first place. Hawthorne even gave the introduction a title, "The Custom House," which ties his introduction specifically to the content of the book.

Title

As readers, we are always struck by the title of a book—which is often the first clue to what we'll find inside. Hawthorne chose a good title, as well as a very accurate one, because it is also symbolic of what the book is about. So the basics begin with the title. The Scarlet Letter? What could that possibly be about? The title is an attention grabber, which makes you want to know more.

Table of Contents

Part of inspecting a book is to read through the table of contents. This applies to fiction and non-action alike. (Not all novels contain chapter titles. Sometimes chapters are just numbered, so you will not always find a table of contents.) Authors and editors work very hard to make a table of contents as concise and relevant for the reader as possible. In a novel, the chapter titles offer clues as to what you will find inside as well. Take a look at the table of contents of this book. You'll see it is carefully constructed to let the reader know exactly what to expect from the text.

The Scarlet Letter has 24 relatively brief chapters. And this novel does contain a table of contents. If you look it over carefully you may find the chapter headings intriguing.

The first four chapters and their titles are as follows:

Chapter I: "The Prison Door"

Chapter II: "The Market Place"

Chapter III: "The Recognition"

Chapter IV: "The Interview"

Every chapter name represents exactly what you can expect that chapter to be about. It was as if Hawthorne had no time to waste. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he said it. In fact, he had the whole book in mind before he ever sat down to write a word. He wrote it in a matter of weeks.

Opening Lines

As a child Trudi Montag thought everyone knew what went on inside others. That was before she understood the power of being different. The agony of being different. And the sin of ranting against an ineffective God. But before that—for years and years before that—she prayed to grow.

—Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River (1994)

Let's look at another way of checking out a book using a different book as an example. These words are the introductory words of a novel called Stones from the River, a book about a German girl who is physically different from the other people in her life and how she struggles with loneliness during the tumultuous times of World War II. Different readers have different feelings about the opening lines of a novel. Amy happens to like it when an author grabs her in the first few sentences, or in the first paragraph. If the author doesn't do this, however, it's not a reason to stop. Other people enjoy a slow buildup to the story—a description of a place or a main character, for example. But the opening words of Stones from the River, combined with the blurb on the back cover, were more than enough for Amy to want to take this book home and stick with it through the next 525 pages.

Here is what it says on the back cover of Stones from the River:

Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyonewho has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar.

If you are currently a reader, you know that it's instinct to flip the book over and read the back or, in the case of a hardcover, to open the book and read the inside flaps of the dust jacket, where the publisher will often provide a summary of the story. After the title and the cover, of course, the next thing you want to know is what it's all about. Some cover blurbs are better than others, but the blurb combined with the opening lines of a book will often be the elements that make you want to know more.

Sense of Style

If nothing really entices you to want to read the book, read the opening paragraph or even a few paragraphs from the middle of the book to get a sense of the author's style. Is the style something that appeals to your own reading sensibilities? Is the tone something you think you might relate to? Maybe the book is written in a completely different way than what you are familiar with and you feel you're up for a new challenge.

It's important to pay attention to the author's style and tone. This book could be with you for several weeks, and you want to get the most you can out of it. There's no point in reading something that you won't absorb or that will bore you to tears.

Bibliography

A bibliography provides source material for a book and is usually found at the back of a book. In some scholarly works and textbooks, you will find endless pages of bibliographical references. These bibliographies can be invaluable to your own studies.

If you are looking for source material for your own academic work, or just for further reading on the same topic, a great place to find it is in someone else's bibliography. Nonaction is not the only reading material to have a bibliography. You will find that novels that have been read, analyzed, critiqued, and studied by literary scholars (commonly referred to as the classics) often have a bibliography at the end.

In Regina's copy of The Scarlet Letter there is a bibliography. It's not Hawthorne's bibliography, however; it's that of the person who wrote another introduction to her particular edition. This can come in very handy if you are looking to read more about Hawthorne and his work.

Further Reading

Many modern-day books contain appendixes indicating other resources to read for further information. Suppose you have a question about something the author has written and you wonder where you can learn more about that topic. At this point, you can flip to the back again and check out some of the suggested reading material. The suggested reading list will be arranged in a bibliographical format. That means it is in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Another example of an appendix may be a list of questions that may be pertinent within book group settings. Even reprinted books, such as The Scarlet Letter, contain such appendixes.

Reading the extra material provided in any book will guide you to a deeper understanding of how the book was written, why it was written, and what was going on in the author's life and times. In the case of Hawthorne, you will even find out what led him to write this story.

Inspecting Nonfiction

Now let's take a look at some nonfiction, which includes books about science, philosophy, history, biography, autobiography, art, music, and a full range of special interests.

Regina enjoys reading about science and looks for books that will appeal to the regular person—those of us who are not scientists. We're just enthusiasts who read out of curiosity. This kind of reader does not have any kind of specialized training in the subject but wants to know more about it. You can find books like this for the layperson in almost all specialized fields of knowledge.

Format at a Glance

Regina has a stack of books she is getting ready to read. The next science-related book she plans to delve into is The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Brian Greene is one of the world's leading physicists, and the reason Regina picked up his book is that he promises the reader (on the inside dust-jacket flap) the opportunity to "look at reality in a completely different way." Now, what better offer could any reader ask for? This intrigued Regina, so she immediately turned to the table of contents where she noticed that the book was divided into 5 parts, 15 chapters, author notes, a glossary of terms, suggestions for further reading, and an index. The combination of the construction of the book, the back flap, and a glance at the author's style of writing were proof enough that this was an eminently readable book and one not meant for scientific professionals. And the glossary was the icing on the cake because she'll be able to understand certain scientific terminology as she reads along.

This nonfiction book is a good example of a fully developed, well-organized format for a lay reader to pursue the subject of physics.

The index, found in the back of the book, comes in handy because if you want to read about something specific, you just go to the back and look for it. It lists topics, names, and terms in alphabetic order with page numbers so you can easily find what you are looking for. For example, if you want to find out about quarks, you can look it up in the index under the letter Q, go to the indicated pages, and see what the author has to say about that subject matter.

Checking References

Some nonfiction books may also contain footnotes, which are stylistically presented differently than bibliographical material. If footnotes are supplied, they are numbered in the body of the text and then matched with the corresponding number and additional information about a topic, in smaller print at the bottom of the page.

What you will find in the notes is the source of the thought, quote, or information. The notes list the author's first then last name, the title of the book, and the page numbers the author took the information from.

There is no set guideline for how any nonfiction book should be constructed. For example, Regina's copy of A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, translated by Wing-Tsit Chan (Princeton University, 1963), is 856 pages long. A "source book" is usually very comprehensive piece of literature, and Regina's book certainly fits that description.

It's illustrative of a comprehensive overview that provides information about historical developments in China, comparisons with western humanism, and specifically introduces the reader to Chinese philosophers over a long period of time. In addition to the extensive information contained in the text, the book provides

a foreword, preface, acknowledgments, chronology of Chinese dynasties, and chronology of philosophers. These pages are numbered with Roman numerals— a stylistic indication that this material is separate from the rest of the book. This book is so comprehensive that it even includes a glossary with Chinese words and

their English translations.

One of the things nonfiction books have in common is the inclusion of extra information to help you have a complete and comprehensive reading experience. You don't have to look beyond the binding of the book unless you really want to. Other nonfiction materials such as autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs—books about people’s lives—are often constructed similarly to a piece of fiction.

Grabbing and Holding On

What an author wants more than anything is for the reader to keep on reading. What's the point of writing a book that readers will put down after the first 10 pages? There's no guarantee that this won't happen; after all, you might like one author's style while another reader prefers a different kind of style. The author knows that some people will like the book and others will not. That's one of the beauties of subjectivity.

Each author will appeal to different kinds of people. For example, there are writers who might open their book with 10 pages of description before getting to the actual story. This will appeal to readers who want to have a feel for the atmosphere before they get into the action. Other readers want to get right to the heart of the story and are only interested in description that applies directly to the story line. The important thing for any author is to hold on to one kind of reader and try to lure in others. Authors use strategies involving narrative voice, humor, point of view, and even foreshadowing to keep you reading. You read more about these techniques, later.

Once you find an author whose work you enjoy reading, you will probably look for more of his or her books. You may even find yourself rereading some of your favorites. The more books you read by specific authors, the more able you will be to identify the style of writing you prefer.

The Least You Need to Know

• You can determine whether a book is right for you by examining its various

parts, such as the cover, table of contents, foreword, and introduction.

• Nonfiction (as well as some fiction) often includes extra material to help you

further understand the text.

• Fiction and nonfiction books are formatted differently.

• Authors employ different techniques to grab and hold the reader's attention.