Two tips for readers

H.W. Brands

Historian H.W. Brands tells in Remarkable Reads about being assigned the book The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams as an 18-year-old college student and finding it lacking. Many years later he read it again, and then again and again, each time finding much of value there. So why the difference? Brands offers two explanations: he was a different person when he read the book a second time, and as a student he had skipped the book's introduction.

If one were to make a list of tips for readers, these two should be on that list:

1. Read a book at the right time.

2. If a book has an introduction, read it.

When I wrote about Middlemarch earlier this year I told how I had found George Eliot's novel incomprehensible when I attempted to read it as a college student. Decades later I found it rich and rewarding. The book hasn't changed, but I have. Some books, such as The Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace, are best read in one's youth. I think the high school and college years are the best time to read most of the classics. That time of life is when great literature is most likely to speak profoundly to us.

As for nonfiction, the obvious time to read it is when it interests us. You wouldn't read a book about parenting before parenthood or after the kids are in college. Of course, some books would interest us if we would only give them a chance, so a reader needs to be open to new possibilities.

As for introductions, reading them is wise, especially for students. A book's introduction is often like the overture to a Broadway musical, summarizing what is to come. It can make a book, especially one one like The Education of Henry Adams, easier to follow. An introduction often tells how the author came to write the book, as does the introduction to The Rhine, a new book by Ben Coates. He says the idea for the book came to him after ice skating in Amsterdam. Bryan Kozlowski's introduction to What the Dickens?, a book I reviewed a week ago, tells of Charles Dickens's passion for unusual words.

Not all books have introductions. Taking a few books off one of my shelves I found, for example, that David McCullough didn't think one was necessary for The Great Bridge, nor did Oliver Sacks for his autobiography On the Move. Good for them. I admire writers who can get right to the point. But when a writer deems an introduction necessary, it's best not to ignore it. If it's important to them, it may be important to us.

Introductions are rare in novels. There are often prologues, but they are a different beast. An author might write an introduction for a new edition of a successful novel first published 20 or 30 years earlier. Classic novels often have new introductions penned by professors of literature. The edition of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens that I read earlier this year has such an introduction. It helped me follow the novel, and students especially would be wise not to pass it over.