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I have complained many times on this blog about mediocre fiction. I’ve also complained about the loss of the art of reading. Put simply, the average person has lost the ability to read. Combining the two, we need to realize that, in order to read better fiction, we must also learn how to read better.

In other words, there is a chain of causes and consequences. It goes in a way like this:

As you can see, there is a feedback loop here. Reading a book poorly will cause you to leave some erroneous feedback. That is, it will lead you to either downplay the importance of a high-quality book, or overestimate the merits of a mediocre one.

Subsequently, this will distort the book’s intrinsic value. In a world replete with noise, a mediocre book read by mediocre readers receives far more attention than a higher-quality book misunderstood by its mediocre readers. Inevitably, this facilitates the creation and propagation of mediocre literature, which leads back to poor reading.

It is a very vicious cycle. And, since art imitates life (which imitates art in another vicious cycle), this leads us to societal mediocrity.

How to Read Better Fiction: Reading Poorly

I often see people placing meaningless focus on how many books they have read this year (or this month, or whatever; you get the idea). That is to say, people seem to favor quantity over quality.

This isn’t surprising. We live in the era where we’re obsessed with counting. If you haven’t read my article on quantifying success, feel free to read about it. Here’s an excerpt indicating some examples:

Is your camera 12 or 24 megapixels? How many GB of RAM is your computer, your phone, your tablet? How tall are you? What’s your shoe size? Will it be a small, medium, or large coke?

Feel free to add, then: How many books did you read this year?

The thing is, if you read 50 books poorly, it’s far worse than having read 5 which you read wisely. But what does it mean to read poorly, and what does it mean to read wisely?

Mediocre Readers Have a Flawed Approach to Literature

Some of the issues touched upon here are related to my article on reviewing fairly, so make sure to take a look at that one as well.

In a nutshell, readers who read poorly do so disregarding the genre and intended audience. In other words, they try to read a book not for what it is, but for what they would want it to be. For example, let’s assume that the book in question is a literary fiction novel.

Such a book, in order to deliver what its intended audience expects, needs to follow certain patterns and tropes. In the case of literary fiction, it would need to display complex, realistic characters, deep introspection, ambiguity and vagueness, as well as “difficult”, controversial topics pertaining to the human experience.

Let’s assume a reader who can barely stand such books. That in itself is nothing but personal preference, telling nothing either about the reader or about the quality of the book. Things would be far different if the reader actually did read the book and then slammed it, reviewing it poorly because it didn’t contain the elements that the specific reader seeks in books.

That is to say, imagine a situation where that reader would rate this book very critically, saying that its plot was too complicated, its characters too complex, and so on. That would be a case of Poor Reading. It would lead to Erroneous Feedback (because it would criticize the book for something that it wasn’t). Inevitably, many such poor reviews would lead to a skewed image of the book (False Assessment), which inevitably valorizes simpler, easier-to-read books with linear structure, leading to Poor Writing. And we’re back to square one.

Concrete Tips on How to Read Better

The first piece of advice given in my article on fair reviews is this: Be yourself, but not when you’re reviewing a book! What this little sentence means is that a wise reader tries to think outside the box.

Reading is about imagination, creating worlds that aren’t “there”, seeing things from another person’s perspective. Studies show that reading literary fiction improves empathy, and the reason is simple: Experienced readers can more easily put themselves in somebody else’s shoes.

So, with these in mind, here’s a quick list of tips that can help you become a wiser reader, regardless of your personal preferences. Each item on the list leads to its subsequent one, so you can consider them as a checklist for reading.

1. Enter the world of the book knowing some basic things about its genre, its connection with other similar books, and its overall place in the literary forest – this is called intertextuality.
2. Read the book with an open mind, realizing that its style and content might be different from what you are used to.
3. Read the book critically, in the sense that you apply a – dare I call it holistic? – sense of comprehension and awareness. Understand not only what you are reading but also why it is the way it is.
4. Seek not what the author shows you, but what s/he doesn’t. A good book will not explain everything, and it is your job to fill in the details.
5. If you plan to review the book, realize that its quality is absolutely irrelevant to whether you liked it or not. Focus on whether the book delivered what the intended audience expects. If you don’t know what that is, you have no business reviewing the book.
6. Breaking the cycle: Even if you don’t like a particular genre, do try to read something from it, preferably something representative. If you only read, say, romance novels or horror fiction, you’re volunteering for a literary echo chamber. That can never be good.