What is Active Reading? The term has about it a hint of some diabolical governmental initiative designed to pull the obese masses out of a glutinous burger and into a good book. Withdraw your gathering fears: we would never sell our souls to any such programme. So far as I am concerned, the truly ignorant may stay where they are: swimming like fag ends in the fatty acids of a second-rate battery-farmed culture. It’s hard enough trying to educate the educated without these other morons trying to squeeze their way into the frame.

    When it comes to reading books, many people think they know precisely 'what is what'. But do they? Invariably, no. The windows of their focus are not only steamed, but pointing in the wrong direction; looking out, as I like to say, upon an invalid vista. We find the attention of these otherwise enthusiastic readers securely fastened onto those that ‘create’ literature: the writers. They think that the writers are everything. And the literary journals (poor reader-less rags that they are) do nothing to push them off course. It is a web of deception into which even I find myself drawn every now and again; a vast tangle of trickery that traps us all from time to time.

    But I am at least brave enough both to recognise my mistake – and to offer to sort through the resulting wreckage. And it is for this reason that I have seized the opportunity to rekindle the interest of the educated in Active Reading; to propagate a shift in emphasis, turning the torches' beam away from the writers and into the faces' of the readers instead. Now is the time to watch them squirm under the light, like so many guilty worms. I don’t mean to let the writers off – god knows they’ll keep on making the glaring mistakes to which they’ve always been partial and god knows I won’t stop drawing attention to this – but it has nevertheless come to the point when readers need to be reminded that they’re part of the problem as well. That’s right – we can’t simply ditch all of our many misgivings onto the writer’s lap. There are as many bad readers as there are bad writers. Most of us are, in fact, bad readers.

    Of course, there are many aspects to this. To begin with, there are those people who simply will not read every sentence. I refer not to those sad creatures who give up half way through, but those who get to the end and believe that they have read it all (though no more than a simple quizzing will prove otherwise). Reading properly the first time is the first crime. Failing to re-read properly is the second.

    I could go on. But Active Reading is not really about reading and re-reading. It is about the logistics of reading and re-reading. Reading the book is not enough. It is how and where you read it that matters. If you read a good book in the wrong place, the experience may not be a good one; and you can’t necessarily blame that on the writer. For a while, however, there are more than a few scapegoats chewing upon the open pasture, waiting around for a load of blame to be tossed upon their scraggy woolly backs. Which is to say that the process of reading has been so greatly ignored that one can hardly claim to have ever been sufficiently educated. The critics, for one, must take their share of this blame. But anyone is welcome to join the line. Excepting, of course, those few figures that follow in what is, so far as I know, the first attempt map out the ground covered by this term Active Reading. To say that this is a comprehensive list would be a lie; rather it is an ongoing project; a seed sown with hope and enthusiasm; a short walk through a small crowd of people who have made more progress than most in what ought to be an ever-growing sphere of interest.

    And so, without wasting so much a precious second of your ever-treasured time, I present to you my ‘Heroes of Active Reading’:

    Johannes Speyer

German literary critic, author of many great works (such as Riding on the Crest of Culture and High Tide for High Art?) and the inevitable originator of Active Reading. Little more needs to be said about his life than has already been collected at this very website (here, here and here). Neverthless it ought to be reiterated that, though a champion of re-reading, it could be safely said that Speyer never explored this ground as much as he would have liked to. And yet, as his pupil, I can reveal that he was always open to new experiences. Critical of the good-light-and-a-comfortable-chair school of thought, he was a refreshingly restless reader, changing the position of his body after almost every sentence; often moving from room to room to get the most of a particular page. When reading Spanish novels, he found it essential to take a shower in-between chapters, in order to ‘cleanse himself’ for the next stage. These were not radical explorations, maybe, but they were the start of something and a reminder to us all that fundamentally it is change itself that is important, not always the extent of that change.

    Xin of Beijing

A mysterious character, who left China in the 1950s and bought a large plot of land in the Black Forest, Germany, where he designed and built a 120-room house, created explicitly for the purpose of reading Cao Xueqin’s ‘Dream of the Red-Chambers’ (which has 120 chapters). The walls of every room are said to be painted a different colour and decorated with furniture from every year of the Jin Dynasty (which lasted approximately 119 years, leaving one room – known as the ‘room of the last chapter’ - empty). In the spring, one hundred and twenty examples of blossom adorn the rooms. Whether or not (or how many times) Xin has kept to his system of reading is hard to know, for so far as we know he has not made any record of his experiences. As it stands, however, this remains one of the most impressive examples of Active Reading there has ever been.
 

    Natalie de Roquet

French writer and pioneer of ‘architectural prose’. De Roquet's three novels were written on the walls and ceiling of the two rooms in which she was trapped by her jealous husband Claude. Although pirate copies of these works have been printed, anyone with an ounce of grey matter will realise that they can only really be read 'in situ' – making them one of few works that can be read in the same position in which they were written. (For more on the complicated matter of reading de Roquet, see here.)

 
    Oa Aayorta

Aayorta’s first novel (Silence with Subtitles) was a film based on a novel written whilst walking from one end of Andorran to the other, whilst his second (The Endless Winter Night) came with a free DVD to be played in the background as reading took place. The real breakthrough, however, came with his third (An Everlasting Evening) which contains a recipe for a course of a meal before each of its seven short chapters. The reader is asked to follow this recipe and read the chapter whilst eating. If he/she does this, they will find themselves enjoying both a sumptuous seven course meal and, through Aayorta’s prose, a so-called ‘synthesis of language and taste unprecedented in the history of culture’. Meanwhile, recent research shows that Aayorta’s interest in new ways of reading goes back further than was first thought -  a short story submitted for an literature assignment at his secondary school in Andorra was accompanied by three packets of spices to be inhaled at appropriate junctures (as indicated by the text). Even academic essays submitted at University came along with a convoy of often extraneous material. However, though such dedication to the cause of progressive reading is exemplary, there is something of the control freak in the way in which Aayorta makes demands of his readers, with his wholly prescriptive methods contradicting a central concept of Active Reading, which states that the reader should ultimately be free to choose their own method of consumption. Despite this, as Aayorta is probably all too aware that most readers prefer to be told what to do (otherwise they would never get anything done at all) there are grounds on which to be lenient – and praise his efforts nonetheless.

 
    Matthias Blomquist

The first man to read every volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu whilst handgliding. Blomquist, a Belgian, has always claimed that his understanding of social mobility as reconstructed in the novels was greatly enhanced by gliding through the air at the time of reading. His wife has always claimed that the experience left him in an irretrevable state of insanity. Recent reports suggest that he now plans to re-read the series, eating a madeleine cake after every three sentences, whilst balancing on an inflatable beach ball (see Swann’s Way - My Way by M Blomquist. LeBoeuf Books, 2005)

 
    Max Luberhaille

I first became aware of Max’s highly unique approach to reading when he appealed to me after having been thrown out of the University where I was working. It seems that library staff had long had an aversion to his habit of taking books apart in order to ‘release each page from imprisonment’, or else his tendency to colour pages in. As for the latter, Luberhaille claims to find it ‘physically impossible’ to read anything on a white background and frequently rails against an industry that demands he should do so. Though his erratic mental state prevented me at the time from supporting his cause, I have since been in contact with him, finding him to be amongst the most original Active Readers there is. It would not be inaccurate to surmuse that Luberhaille never reads a book in the same way. Some of his recent methods include pinning seperate pages of a novel (re-printed on pink paper) to every tree in a wood and then reading them at night with a torch; reading every sentence of a book ninety four times before allowing himself to move on to the next; having a different friend read each chapter aloud to him down the phone whilst various people wash his hair in many different types of shampoo and, lastly, reading whilst bathing in hot curry. He does not rate any of these methods above another; they are merely ‘means to an end’; methods through which to ‘maximise the pleasure that can only originate in the book itself’.
 

    Arnold Biffwright

The American scholar’s 1974 study Precious Dream Rabbit: Wodehouse on LSD was a surprise hit in university campuses across the country. The first half is purely awful nonsense, arguing (with all the intellectual prowess of an ailing woodlouse) that Wodehouse was not only in the habit of sniffing the white stuff, but that his talent depended on it. The second half is a rather more mature assessment of reading Wodehouse on drugs which, for all its charms, is ultimately a redundant experience, since reading Wodehouse is in itself a powerful anti-depressant. However, in that the book encouraged a generation of drug-takers and alcholics to take read literature under the influence (rather than trash their best friends’ bedrooms) Biffwright might yet be applauded.

 

    The South-Hungarian Over-80s Water-Polo Book Club

A group of no less than thirty elderly Hungarians who, tiring of water-polo, have begun to experiment with underwater reading. Josef Volvidik, secretary of the club – and proud owner of his own laminator – claims to have read around fifty books underwater. He produces his own waterproof versions of the books, which he then lends out to club members. Results appear to show that many of the so-called classics of modern literature are much less impressive when read in this fashion, whereas nineteenth century novels take on a new life altogether.
 

    Eva Holubk

Georgian poet, whose second collection The Marmalade Jar was published upside down then backwards by the Upside-Down-Then-Backwards publishing house. Disappointed by her early lack of success, Holubk had the confidence to realise that the fault lay not with her style of writing but with the style of reading exhibited by her audience. 

 
   Turning-Leaf publishing house

A small Scottish publishing house which prints poems and short stories onto natural materials, including leaves. It is also a firm supporter of ‘natural reading’; which refers to reading in the nude and to reading outdoors (with a view to both). Its founder, Duncan McAllister, hopes one day to have an entire Walter Scott novel tattoed to his body, in order that his wife may at last get around to reading it.
 

    S P Redling

Redling’s 2004 work New Light on the Old Philosophers was, in intellectual terms, an amateur work. But not for want of trying. Indeed, it came closer to being a breakthrough than most people gave it credit for. Redling’s only problem, really, was that he failed to see beyond a basic concept of Active Reading; applying its structures without due care and attention. In deciding to re-read the great philosophers of the Western world in a new context he had hit upon a charming idea; whilst in allowing mere alliteration as a means of choosing that context he seems to have set himself up for a fall. If only he had tried to read Plato on a space hopper and Socrates on a pogo stick instead of the other way around, we may have been closer than ever before to a new understanding of the ancients.

 
    Jacques Brunettin

A French tight-rope walker and avid active reader. As far as we know Brunettin is the only man to have read an entire novel on a tight-rope. (the novel in question being Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance).

 
    Alexi Minchevic

A Serbian athlete. Minchevic used to compete in all the major International marathons until one day she confessed to being ‘somewhat bored by all that running’. Though she continues to take part, she now carries a book with her, which broadens both her mind and her race-time. She recommends Pyetr Turgidovksy as the ideal ‘marathon companion’.
 

    E P Rosch

Author of the famous poem ‘Read’ – the clearest espousal of Active Reading in contemporary literature. Rosch has never pretended, however, to come even close to the perfect reader suggested in his verse. In fact, one suspects him of being somewhat of a charlatan, though the success of ‘Read’ nevertheless earns him a place on this list.

(If one should know of any 'Active Readers' worthy of inclusion on this list,
one is welcomed to contact the editor at georgyriecke@underneaththebunker.com )


'Heroes of Active Reading' - Part Two

Further Selections from Underneath the Bunker

Underneath the Bunker Homepage