It is drilled into us, in both school and university, that books must have a clear meaning, that they must represent something else, or are explicable only by something external to themselves.
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But these readings attempt to move us away from what we are reading, to a guide or teacher who will provide the answer. We hardly need to read the text itself: everything we need is provided elsewhere.
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This is not to say that it isn’t useful to situate a book in history, theory, or in comparison to other texts. But these are always conversations. You add two texts together, on equal footing, and see what results from the coupling.
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As a first step, a good reading inhabits the text. It looks at its inner workings. What does it do? What does it do to the reader, other texts, or itself? Where does it lead, and where does it not go far enough?
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When reading, I keep Deleuze in mind: “We feel that same way about our book. What matters is whether it works, and how it works, and who it works for. It’s a machine too. It’s not a matter of reading it over and over again, you have to do something with it.”
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