I Am Slowly Discovering That I Have No Idea How to Read
Over the last month and a half or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually don’t know how to read, which is definitely a jarring realization to be having after over 18 years of formal education.
Okay, maybe I’m being a little bit cheeky here. I am not literally claiming to be illiterate or even functionally illiterate, and it would be stupid of me to do so, since clearly I am writing this blog post and have written many other blog posts where I reviewed books. However, one of the things my high school education didn’t prepare me for, and that my four years of training and education in engineering and computer science have completely failed to teach me, is how to both get through and learn from – “learn from” is the key term here – a large volume of readings on a weekly basis.
I highly doubt it is my reading speed that is the problem here. I read much faster than most people I know - I will typically get through 95% (or maybe even 99%) of novels in under 5 hours. If reading 30 pages of text for a class was an equivalent experience to reading 30 pages of a novel for fun, I would not be writing this. The problem is that reading textbooks, articles, or God forbid, academic research papers for educational purposes is a very different experience from reading novels. What’s more, even reading fiction for academic purposes is a very different experience from reading for fun, at least in my experience. These are all examples of analytical reading with a purpose – the goal isn’t just to enjoy the characters and the story, but to find evidence to construct an argument, or to learn new techniques for solving problems, or to gain more knowledge on a topic, and so on. When it comes to this type of reading, while yes, reading speed helps, it is 100% not enough.
I’m not saying that I can’t do analytical reading at all – clearly I’ve gotten through all this education somehow. However, it is slow and I have no idea how to do it efficiently, and because of the educational path I went down I did not pick up this skill early. In computer science, you typically don’t run into courses with mandatory readings for the first few years, and now, all of a sudden, I am in a 4th year course where the main learning modality is to read an entire textbook and absorb the content that way. My issue isn’t with having to read the textbook, it’s with figuring out how on earth I’m supposed to engage enough with the material to actually remember any of it after I read it. Usually I would take notes as I read, but I found very quickly that there was no way I was going to get through half of the textbook in a month and a half if I kept stopping to take detailed notes.
So what am I supposed to do? Skim and only take notes in a few places? Heavily annotate? Pull out the highlighter? Read stuff over and over? For now I’ve defaulted to reading everything once and highlighting and annotating, but even though that’s much faster, I’m not entirely convinced that it will enable me to remember anything. Maybe remembering the details of things I read is the skill I was meant to pick up. Is there anyone who can actually do that?
In addition to this fourth year CS course where I somehow need to digest an entire textbook in three months, I am also taking three English courses, whereas in the past I’ve only ever taken one English course at a time. In the past, I only ever took writing courses, but now, I am additionally in a experiential publishing course and a literary essay writing course, and as a result, my volume of assigned readings has more than quadrupled. I am no stranger to the practice of reading for workshop, but reading and providing feedback on several of my classmates’ short stories every week, on top of reading and reflecting 1-2 other assigned short stories each week, is already a lot of reading. But I am new to reading for literary publication, where you might need to get through dozens of works in a few weeks (or a few days) and decide which works to publish. And all of a sudden I also have to *analyze literature* and *engage critically with the theory readings* in my literary essay writing course and honestly, I don’t know how to do this. Not only am I reading more for school than I ever have in the past, I am also having to read in several new ways. These new ways are skills I do not have yet and didn’t realize existed.
When I read for my essay writing course, I struggle to figure out how I should be approaching the text and the theory texts we use for analysis. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be “getting under the surface of the text” or coming up with ideas on what to analyze. I feel like I’m supposed to be pulling from so much historical and cultural context and theoretical knowledge that I simply do not have. I’m not sure how to read or interpret the theories or apply them to the story. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be constructing a lens that I impose onto the story or if I’m supposed to be putting the story into a conversation with other ideas. A while ago I went down an internet rabbit hole where I tried to learn about “close reading” because I felt like I didn’t know a good way to engage with literature and pull out ideas and conclusions.
This is what I mean when I say I feel like I have no idea how to read. I think way too many people write off humanities majors as not actually learning anything, but this is the type of reading they do day in and day out, and as a typical STEM major, I can’t do it. It is slow, and it is painful, and it is a skill I wish I’d been formally taught how to do. Trying to learn how to do literary analysis is giving me the same kind of pain and confusion as I first had when trying to decipher mathematical research papers. I have never understood the idea of humanities degrees teaching you transferable skills as much as I am now while trying to get through this massive volume of texts. (Whether or not the specific skill of literary analysis is actually useful outside of academic contexts is another discussion, however.)
I feel kinda overwhelmed and illiterate now, if I’m going to be completely honest. I also have a lot more respect for literary analysis as an academic discipline and a much better understanding of what it takes to be good at it. I also have a lot of sympathy for students in programs that frequently require them to read upwards of 20 pages of text per class every week, or even several books in a week, because I can’t do that and still be able to talk about the texts coherently. It’s too much. I didn’t build that stamina earlier in my degree and it’s biting me in the face right now.
Anyway, when I entered this semester, there are a lot of things I expected to have to do, but learning how to read in several new ways was definitely not one of them. I wasn’t planning on doing any more literary analysis – I’m only taking this essay course because it’s mandatory for my minor – but I’m starting to think I might take more literary theory courses. Part of my reasoning for this is that I don’t like feeling illiterate, and right now I feel very illiterate when I hang out with people who studied literature. I think it’ll feel wrong to have minored in English and still be illiterate. But the other reason is that I think studying literature will build my reading skills in ways that transfer back to my life in computer science. Maybe having tools for reading dense theory texts will also help me decipher dense mathematical language in some way. Who knows.