The Partial Reader
With a nod to Brad over at The Browser — a blog celebrating books skimmed, not read, forgotten, heard about, and etc. — here’s an excerpt in that vein from Brick‘s interview with the writer Lydia Davis:
LD: … I didn’t read the whole book. I have to say that habit has continued. I rarely read the whole of a book, especially a book that really interests me stylistically.
Q: Really?
LD: Yes, I mean, sometimes I go back and finish it, and sometimes I read it all the way through, but it’s somehow enough to read the first ten or twenty pages and be amazed by what’s going on. But I think in those cases I’m reading it for my own craft. I’m really a lot less interested in what happens in that kind of book and how it ends, even though I know that’s a whole other part of it. I’m just interested in how the writer is approaching the material and what he or she does with it.
– Brick, Summer 2008
