How to Read a Novel
> But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters. [...] Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers.
To toss another into the ring, I can't think of any novel I've read that could rival The Brothers Karamazov in this regard. Possibly East of Eden, but as great as it is it plumbs nowhere near the moral and psychological depths of Dostoevsky.
Steven Johnson encourages us to think across multiple scales of experience when reading 19th-century novels. I agree and I’d argue Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s, was the prototype.
Don Quixote has always been one of my favorite books because it genuinely entertains me on a deep level. Every time I return to it, I’m pulled into a world that’s funny, sad, strange, and timeless.
Long before modern psychology, Cervantes captured the messy, conflicted inner life of someone trying to make sense of a changing world.
Books like this still matter, not just as stories, but as a way to practice seeing the world in layers, something that helps us stay grounded and think more clearly in today’s fast-moving, story-saturated world.
I went through the same phase a couple decades ago and also came out with Middlemarch on top. Oddly I'd never heard of it prior, and only grabbed it because it was in some classics list at B&N. It didn't seem like anything I expected to like, but I was astounded.
The one book I couldn't understand all the hoopla about was Faust. Even after reading it twice, it just seemed like a banal overplayed moral tale. Maybe it only works in German?
Reading literary fiction is such an enriching activity in life, I highly recommend it. If you don't know where to start (and you need to retrain your attention span), pick up an audiobook. I started with Jeremy Iron's reading of Lolita. Nabokov's prose read in Iron's voice will make a believer out of anyone.
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the single takeaway from this book ad of a post: the CEO of Stripe claims to have read 10 novels/yr. Which is either a boast of how much free time he has or how he skimmed through some major novels. Third option: a lie.
The post does not answer 'How to Read a Novel'.
Most of the post is devoted to 'Why I think fiction is useful'.
The author's answer: vicarious learning.
Author answers how to maybe rank and choose a book: Book that provides recognizable experience of human decision making is better than book that does not.
Which is fine. But not 'How to Read a Novel'.