That tingle in the spine

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

Vladimir Nabokov

In those four sentences Vladimir Nabokov breaks down the reading experience into four aspects — the mental, the emotional, the physical and even the spiritual. Interestingly he rates the emotional as the highest, more important even than reading's intellectual component. We read with our minds, he says, but we feel with our spines. That feeling, he suggests, is reading's greatest reward.

Nabokov's subject is the challenging Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, not just any book that might be at the top of the current best-seller list. So we might wonder if the great novelist, the author of Lolita, would expand his comment to include just any sentimental romance or edge-of-the-seat thriller. Perhaps he would, for whatever we might choose to read, the payoff, if there is one, usually comes through our emotions. We want books to excite us, move us, thrill us, amuse us, inspire us, whatever. Otherwise we are likely to put them down and forget about them.

Interesting facts, profound stories or sound intellectual arguments are all well and good, and for some readers this may be all it takes to stir an emotional response, but for most of us readers it takes a tear, a laugh, a burst of anger or perhaps just that tingle in our spine.