Rereading

During the entire blog entry, Chung made and an argument about the importance of rereading in order to understand a text. Although she described her experience in revisiting texts, specifically The Great Gatsby she also made it clear that doing this is an essential part to becoming a good reader and therefore, writer. Still, this has not been the first time I have been exposed to this concept. During class, not only did I watch a lecture that emphasized greatly on the importance of rereading but also, the very activities we do. The analytic essay we did on The Albatross shows this practice in a smaller but equally important way.

Before reading this blog I underestimated the importance of rereading books. Since most of their ideas seemed clear I believed that such practice was not necessary in order to completely understand it. Now, I see the connection between reading smaller texts like those on an exam and the longer books. Just like it is necessary to read the same poem several times in order to understand its meaning, a book must be reread in its entirety. Usually, when I was given a book of a certain length I didn’t consider the possibility of reading it several times. My process was simply reread any segments that were troublesome or particularly dense. Although this provided with key information that allowed to me to perform close readings and do most of the analysis required to obtain a good idea of the book’s meaning, I lost in an area I had not seen before. The process itself made me lose sight of the more generalized view of the book. Although I might understand all the pieces individually, I might lose myself in the way these independent pieces fitted together. This process came from the misconception that a book was a collection of smaller texts but as Coming Through Slaughter proved to me this is not always true.

Although the writing in this book may seem episodic, in the sense that it deals with glimpses of life rather than a fluent narrative, understanding how those independent pieces tie themselves together is essential. Thanks to the course I now understand how the workshop on close reading, the lecture on how to become better readers and this blog entry come together. Even if this was not necessarily the original intention of the class what I learned through these three essential processes will allow me to view future readings in a different way. Now, books will no longer be a collection of smaller pieces but a whole that must be seen in its entirety in order to be understood.