On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Bob Henderson wrote:
> There have been no discussions on this list whether one should read a
> book starting at the beginning and reading sequentially to the end
> rather than starting from the last page and reading backwards to the
> beginning i.e. some things we take for granted and because we have no
> doubts about their veracity, we do not discuss them; we discuss those
> things we believe in but unless we are preaching, we usually discuss
> those matters where we have some uncertainty in our beliefs or gaps in
> our knowledge.
Actually, I know people who read books out of sequence. My mother, for
one; if she picks up the book because she thinks she'll like it, but gets
bogged down, she'll read the last chapter, then try to pick up again where
she got bogged down. If that doesn't work, she'll read the next-to-last
chapter, then try again where she got bogged down. There's one book that
she read one chapter at a time, last to first, because it just wasn't what
she was expecting and had a hard time with it. (When she was done, she
handed it to me, and my being the ultra-linear person that I am, I read
the book first page to last, and didn't see what her problem was. Then
again, I just don't understand her on a number of levels, she doesn't
understand me, and we started getting along a lot better when we realized
that that was just the Way Things Are, and tried connecting on the levels
where we *do* understand each other more.)
I haven't skipped to the middle of a book since I was about 9 or 10. (I
also don't give up on books in the middle, even if one seems to be a waste
of my time -- if I do that, I've admitted that the time I've put into it
already was a waste, and I hate doing that.)
Another reading method that probably works better for non-fiction is to
skim the book, then go back and read the chapters that looked to be of
most interest.
Being ultra-linear in reading habits can become a bit of a handicap when
you start reading stuff on the web with lots of links to other parts of
the whole. What is the order of the whole thing? Are there many orders,
each equally valid? What if you want to take such a document from the web
and publish it in book form -- you've got to linearize the whole thing;
what's going to work best for that?
I'm sorry if this tangent was not at all the sort of thing you had in mind
when you made your post, but it gave me the opening to put down in words
some stuff that had been bouncing around in my head for awhile. I
appreciate your giving me the opening to do so.
Julia
p.s. the possessive of "it" is "its" -- no apostrophe. Other than that,
your post looked very well-written to me. (Pet peeve. More my problem
than yours, really.)
