Reading

This page offers a way into the writing at The Book Hold: essays, reviews, and reading guides.

Start reading here

To get a sense of the sort of reading being done here, you might start with one of these posts:

• A discussion of Olga Ravn’s most recently translated book, The Wax Child, situated within her broader interest in the mysterious lives of objects
• A tongue-in-cheek reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight, using it as an opportunity to think about helicopters in Los Angeles
• A discussion of Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley, reflecting on how Redonnet’s formal and stylistic choices shape the work

Ways of reading

The Book Hold approaches reading in several different ways.

One is by focusing on a number of works by the same author. These pieces range from introductory guides to more explicitly theoretical engagements. For example:

• Dubliners on a first pass reads James Joyce’s early short-story collection as an entry point for his prose works
• Introduction to Roussel offers background on how and why to read the (odd) works of Raymond Roussel

Another approach takes single books as occasions for reflection. Some typical examples include:

• Carmen Laforet’s Nada read in the broader context of realism in Spain during the advent of Francoism
• Călinescu’s Zacharias Lichter, emphasizing the complexities of interpreting the narrator’s relation to the titular subject

Reading problems

At other times, questions about how reading happens, or about the assumptions we make when reading, emerge and demand a different sort of attention. I try to address these questions in posts such as these:

• What is extreme reading?, which describes the sort of reading The Book Hold engages in and the challenges it confronts
• Who’s afraid of a little theory?, a self-critical examination of some assumptions that recur here, and the beginning of a broader inquiry into alternative ways of thinking about literature

Reading as a project

Some reading on The Book Hold unfolds over time, across several works joined by a shared historical, thematic, or other thread. These projects live in The stacks.