Deep Reading

I started my deep rereading of Moby Dick on Christmas 2023. That day is significant in the story. It is not the start of the book. It is Chapter 22, which is when the Pequod finally sets sail. So, I set sail on Christmas Day deeply reading one chapter per day and writing in a journal about each chapter.

Some chapters are very short. None are extremely long. If you ever read the novel, you know that there are many chapters about whales and whaling that seem to have little to do with the narrative of the men aboard the Pequod and their obsessed Captain Ahab.

Our narrator is Ishmael who tells us right away in a famous line that you can “Call me Ishmael,” but that is not his real name. It is a Biblical name that usually symbolizes orphans, exiles, and social outcasts. The Ishmael of the Book of Genesis is banished into the desert. Melville’s Ishmael sends himself out to wander the sea, and ends up an orphan.

Here is a poem from my Writing the Day website.

The Pequod and the Rachel

It was the Pequod that pursued Moby-Dick,
but in the end Melville wanted us
to remember that it was the Rachel,
searching again for her own missing children,
who came upon Ishmael – yet another orphan.

If you explore deep reading, you find phrases such as “reading with intention.” But isn’t that how we always read? No. Surface reading and skimming is more common and at times a necessary way to read certain materials.

Maryanne Wolf directs the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA and is the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World, and Proust And The Squid: The Story And Science Of The Reading Brain.

As a parent and teacher, I was always concerned with the way children read. As a grandparent, I now wonder and worry whether or not children today will learn to incorporate the full range of “deep reading” processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain. There is a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention. I fall victim to these distractions too. Quick access to immediate, voluminous information must alter in some ways our abilities to think for ourselves.

Wolf says, “We were never born to read. And that means that human beings don’t have, if you will, a place. They don’t have a genetic program for reading the way we do for language and vision and even affect. Everything has these genetic programs. It’s just not the way reading is because it’s an invention. It doesn’t exist in our brain. Rather, we have to learn it. And that means our brain has to make a new circuit.”

And so I have made an effort to deliberately do deep reading. With my rereading of Melville finished, I’m considering my next deep read. It could be any book – fiction or non-fiction – but I’m tending to think big. My possibilities include rereading Dante or Homer (which I haven’t read since college) or some big books that I never read or never finished, such as Gravity’s Rainbow, or Ulysses.

Marcel Proust wrote a little book called On Reading that I suspect no one reads. Should I take on his seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time?

Wolf also said “…the fact is Siddhartha can be read a lot faster than Narcissus And Goldmund or Glass Bead Game or poetry. Poetry requires a different pace, too. So I ask your reader to – if they really are serious, you can discipline yourself and return to yourself.”

Deep reading is a discipline and can be a daily practice. Maybe I should take down my old Norton Anthology of Poetry and read a poem a day deeply. At 1400+ pages, that should keep me busy.