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I just realized I've been reading book club picks all wrong for years
I was halfway through our March pick, 'The Overstory', and my friend pointed out I was only tracking the human characters. She asked me what I thought the trees wanted, and I was totally stuck. Has anyone else missed a book's whole point because they were stuck on one way of reading?
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the_parker5d ago
Totally get that, it's like reading with blinders on. @dianal94 has the right idea about asking what the setting wants, it forces you to see the whole picture. My trick is to write down every time the non-human stuff changes, which shows you what it's really doing.
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kimr1014d ago
Had a similar thing happen with a different book. I started writing down what the house itself seemed to notice in the margins. It sounds silly, but it forced me to pay attention to the background as a real place.
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wright.lisa5d ago
That's a cool trick. Do you ever find that the house's "noticing" starts to change the way you see the characters in it?
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My book club read that last year and I had the same exact problem for the first hundred pages. I was so focused on the family dramas that I completely missed how the forest was its own main character. It made me go back and reread the opening chapter about the chestnut tree with a totally new mindset. Now I try to ask myself what the setting wants in every story, not just the people.
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