For too
long, our educational system has oversimplified the practice of reading while
pretending that only one method works: Read
as fast as you can, from beginning to end, in a straight line, without skipping
anything. The fastest reader is the best reader and gets the gold star and the
certificate for free ice cream! This, of course, punishes deliberate,
careful students and booklovers who delight in the process and incorporate what
they read into their everyday lives. The dominant method of reading works
for simple linear texts, but it is by no means the only way to go about reading
and excludes many other types of texts. In How to Read, veteran
novelist, editor and educator Eckhard Gerdes reveals 81 different approaches for
reading, opening up new horizons that restrictive educators have been blocking
from view for far too long. This innovative guidebook will enrich the
experience of textuality for young and old readers alike.
“Eckhard
Gerdes has messed up my head—in the best way possible. I haven't been this
dazzled by a book since Queneau's Exercises in Style. How to Read will definitely shake things
up.” —Derek Pell, author of X-Texts and The Little Red Book of Adobe LiveMotion
“Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible, goes the slogan scrawled
across the Parisian walls in May 1968: Be realistic, ask the impossible.
That's precisely what Eckhard Gerdes does on every page of his critifiction
about how to read, which is to say about how to write, which is to say about
how to rewrite, which is to say about how to un-write. It's ingenious,
impossible revolution all the way down.” —Lance Olsen, author of Architectures of
Possibility: After Innovative Writing