How do you read great works of imaginative literature?
I get asked this question quite often, usually by readers who already know how to read certain other types of book (e.g. popular fiction, self-development, textbooks).
But when it comes to these great big books, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, plays by Shakespeare, or poetry by Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, people come up nonplussed.
And I’m not surprised. We do have Literature classes in school, but they rarely teach us how to read these great works.
So let me try and correct that with the advice in this video: