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Ep. 29. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading
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In this episode I talk to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst about his nonfiction book Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading (2025).
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst was born in 1968 and lives in Oxford, where he is a Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His most recent books are Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading (2025) and Metamorphosis: a Life in Pieces (2023). Previous books include The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World (2021) The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (2015) and Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011). His other publications include Victorian Afterlives (2002), and editions of A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, London Labour and the London Poor, The Water-Babies, and The Collected Peter Pan for Oxford World’s Classics, and A Tale of Two Cities for Norton. He is a regular reviewer and features writer for publications including the Times, Spectator, and Literary Review. He has worked as a historical consultant on BBC adaptations of Jane Eyre (2006), Emma (2009), and Great Expectations (2011), the 20-part BBC1/Red Planet series Dickensian (2015-16) and the Netflix feature films Enola Holmes (2019) and Enola Holmes 2 (2022). In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for writers, readers and anyone that wants to know how texts get made.
Interview with Robert Douglas Fairhurst
00:00:11
Speaker
Today I talked to Robert Douglas Fairhurst about his 2025 book Look Closer, How to Get More Out of Reading from Fern Press.
00:00:20
Speaker
This is another episode in my series where I talk to critics about the practice of close reading. Robert was born in 1968 and lives in Oxford, where he is a professor of English literature and a fellow of Magdalene College.
00:00:31
Speaker
His most recent books are look Closer and Metamorphosis, A Life in Pieces. Previous books include The Turning Point, A Year That Changed Dickens and the World, The Story of Alice, Lewis Carroll and the Secretity of Wonderland, and Becoming Dickens, The Invention of a Novelist.
00:00:45
Speaker
In 2015, Robert was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Significance of 'Look Closer' for the Podcast
00:00:51
Speaker
Welcome, Robert. It's nice to see you today. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. So we are here today to talk about your book, Look Closer, from the wonderful Fern Press. I love Fern. They know i love them. um It's getting a bit weird now, I think, at this point. But anyway, they're doing really good work and putting great books out there. And when I first heard that this book was coming out, I spoke to my friend, Fern, being like,
00:01:14
Speaker
How do I get this book? This seems perfect for the podcast in terms of like reading and books up close. I mean, it's called Look Closer. I have like a range of things I want to ask you, but I ask everyone this first up, which is how do you feel about close reading as an
The Importance of Close Reading
00:01:29
Speaker
activity? Like obviously you've written a book about it.
00:01:31
Speaker
You're an academic. So like, I feel like I know maybe what you're going to say, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you feel about it as a practice. Well, I mean the book's called Look Closer partly because I think that's what all reading helps us do. um That is i think a page of good writing isn't just a mirror that we hold up to the world. It can work also like of like a filter or a lens.
00:01:54
Speaker
that helps us bring the world into better focus. ah But the reason I called the book Look Closer is also because i I wanted to show readers how to get more out of the book by sifting, by savouring words, rather than just gobbling them down as quickly as as they can. so So how to read in a way that gives words time to do their work,
00:02:17
Speaker
or maybe reveal their capacity for play. And you add all that together, and no, you won't be surprised to learn, I think close reading is crucial. I think it's crucial as a skill, as a habit, as an imaginative opportunity, and and lots more besides. and And in my own case, I mean, no doubt some of this goes back to the way that I was taught to read as a student at Cambridge, where a paper in Practical Criticism or, yes, Close Reading,
00:02:49
Speaker
was, I think still is, a compulsory part of the English degree. But close reading, I think, is much more than just an exercise in, how can I put this, academic nostalgia.
00:03:02
Speaker
It's much more than just the throwback to I.A. Richards and what was later called new criticism before it became just another kind of old criticism. Hmm. And as I point out in the book, it's also, I think, a a really important alternative to the kind of reading we've just grown used to doing in our own information economy, where we tend to scan, to skip.
00:03:27
Speaker
And that's on the page as well as online. We're we're more used to these days to filleting texts for a set of authors' thoughts, rather than allowing the act of reading to shape things our own thinking.
The Art of Slow Reading
00:03:43
Speaker
But then, mean, ultimately, I suppose but the reason i wrote the book, what what I'm trying to get at is that maybe what we all really need to do is to slow down no what what Not to gobble things down, to slow down. um And there's a lot that's been written recently about the various movements that are there to try and help people get more out of life by taking it at a less frantic pace. So we talk about slow food, about slow work, slow parenting, slow travel, even slow sex. Yeah.
00:04:14
Speaker
And what we maybe need as readers, particularly now, is is more slow reading. And slow reading, of course, is also close reading.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. Every time I ask people this question, close comes with other things too, with other kind of words. So like you're picking up on like pace and temporality. In a recent episode, I talked to Sarah Ahmed and she talked about not just close reading, but close listening.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yes, yes. Like noticing, right? So it's interesting that like to me that close reading comes with all these other kinds of metaphors too, right? because when we talk about close, we're not talking about just like bringing it to your face, right? We're talking about paying attention, noticing. so you kind of bring all these other words, yeah.
00:04:59
Speaker
and and And interestingly, that that we use the word close also to talk about um what is missed. the We talk about close encounters or close shaves. And and there is always the danger that close reading is another form of what you miss. It involves a certain kind of selectivity. It involves a certain mode of attention, which therefore is giving up on other kinds of reading, other forms of attention. So I wouldn't for a moment say that it's the the only thing form of reading that has value. But I do think it is a particular form which we are in danger of of missing out on, not least because it gives us so much more than just dwelling on the words on the page.
00:05:40
Speaker
And you kind of hinted at this in your last answer about kind of like how we read now, to borrow Elaine Castillo's title, but is there something going on now
Purpose Behind Writing 'Look Closer'
00:05:50
Speaker
that you think is contributing to this? And and I asked that because i I wondered why you wrote this book now in your career. yeah You've written academic books, you've written books for the public, you've been teaching for like a while. Like, was there a kind of urge in you to write this for this moment?
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, there absolutely was. i mean, whenever I'm asked this question, i've and I've been asked a few times, um I always think about that famous poem by William Henry Davis called Leisure and those lines, what is this life if full of care?
00:06:19
Speaker
We have no time to stand and stare. The reason those lines are so so famous, I think, is that people have always known that what reading gives us, what it can give us,
00:06:31
Speaker
is an opportunity to discover what Wordsworth might call wise passiveness. That is letting us, rather than simply um follow the rhythms of life as they are, to press the pause button, to to sift life for its significance and to to recover language as something that has an aesthetic dimension as well as a purely pragmatic, functional dimension.
00:07:02
Speaker
But, and the reason I wanted to write the book now, is that um as people read less, as they read perhaps less carefully, as they are deluged with soundbites and with memes and with um social media posts, as literature comes to be seen a minority pursuit in a world that instead seems to promote instant gratification, instant judgments.
00:07:30
Speaker
What I thought might be useful would be just to remind people of what reading can do for us, what it can do to us. And to do that by giving a sort of crash course in kind of critical reading that then might encourage us to to think about things more carefully in a maybe more balanced, more nuanced way, and to show that that's what reading can
Perspectives on Reading and Writing
00:07:52
Speaker
do for us. That reading itself, if we do it with the right toolkit or right approach, can itself be a kind of education into a form of attention.
00:08:03
Speaker
rather than itself only rewarding form of attention. Yeah. And I thought we could kind of look at some of the book that you've written. For those who haven't read it yet, please do go get it. but You kind of break it down to these sections, how to begin, how to meet new people, how to get involved. It's like really interesting, like non literary phrases, right, as a kind of way into these texts and these approaches.
00:08:25
Speaker
But I almost kind of wanted to think about your book itself, right? You say early on that the first sentence of a book is a kind of threshold, right? From kind of like our world into the book's world.
00:08:37
Speaker
And whenever I think of that, I always think of the J.M. Kurtzier novel, semi-autofictional book, Elizabeth Costello, which I think is like one of his best. And he begins it this way. And I think the quote kind of struck ah accord with me There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely how to get us from where we are, which is as yet nowhere, to the far bank.
00:08:58
Speaker
It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. He's being very playful here, right? Like how do you get into a text? How do you get a reader to where you are? And he's like, well, you could just, you could just do it, right? It just happened. And I was thinking about the bridge in your book is really interesting, right? You begin present tense,
00:09:18
Speaker
it is early in the evening and my bedroom is full of rabbits. And you're like oh, that present tense is kind of slippery, right? You kind of immediately think we're here with you in the present. And then suddenly I'm probably four or five years old. And in my hands is a copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
00:09:33
Speaker
And my mother is helping me to read. And I wonder, like, you do your own kind of fairy tale opening, right? Like this room full of rabbits, this kind of spectacle of something strange, unexpected. Like, I wonder how you thought about opening this book.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, Cotter, of course, when he says it's a simple, original I mean, nothing is more complicated than simplicity. And one of the things that any writer knows is when you write, you have to recognise that the rewriting process is mostly going to be about um simplifying. It's going to be about combing things out. It's going to be about untangling knotty things rather than making your ideas as knotty as possible.
00:10:18
Speaker
Okay, so why why why begin a book like this? Well, the book as a whole is for people who might think that they enjoy being transported by the acts of reading, but they're not quite sure how or why they get to where they are when they're transported. And so what I try and do in my book is to give them the pecans of the bonnet to show them how...
00:10:41
Speaker
of work of writing is doing what it does with them or to them or through them or for them. But I think like a lot of people, when I was learning to read as a four or five-year-old child through stories like that one, through the the tale of Peter Rabbit, it it didn't feel like being given the keys to a Ferrari. It it felt it felt more like and like trying to walk in a body that still seemed like an alien creature I couldn't quite control.
00:11:09
Speaker
So the reason I open the book, as I do, is, yes, it's it's a kind of joke, because fairy tales tend to deal with magical instant transformations, whereas the process that I describe in the ah opening paragraphs, that that sort of stumbling early attempt at reading, it shows, I hope, that reading is a skill that And like any other skill, it gets better with practice.
00:11:36
Speaker
Like a hang in the book, I say it's like a golf swing or it's like playing musical instrument. And again, the reason i I take the reader back to my own childhood is to remind them and maybe remind myself that we don't stop learning to read once we can decipher one word or after another.
00:11:54
Speaker
I quote I. Richard saying that we are all of us learning to read all of the time. That's you, me, everyone. And what I try to do through the book is to acknowledge my weaknesses, my own failures, my own problems.
00:12:08
Speaker
even as a reader who's paid to do what I do, and to recognise that books which I'm rereading, or books which I'm coming across for the first time, they all change the way that I read, because that is what we read with. We read with our experiences of past readings, and therefore it's a constantly evolving process.
00:12:33
Speaker
Can I pick up on that about like reading as a skill? You quote I.A. Richards, but you also quote Marianne Wolfe, who's got a great book on kind of like the science of like reading, if people are into that.
00:12:45
Speaker
sort of And I wonder like how you think about that practice. Is it just reading more? Like, is it reading slowly? Like, as you said earlier, is it reading widely, right? Is it, you know, if we've only read a certain genre or a certain kind of canon of authors or a particular like nationality? Like, how do you see that practice? What in your mind it is something that we can all be doing to hone that craft?
00:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, is is it about reading slowly or more widely or more closely? I think it's all of those things. i I think it's about learning how to flip the telescope in your hand so that, yes, we do read closely and we also read widely and we think about the relationship between those things.
00:13:27
Speaker
and And in practice, what what does that mean? it It means we learn how to isolate key details, but also it means that we recognize that when we place those details in their context,
00:13:39
Speaker
It can be a bit like touching a spider's web so that the whole thing trembles into life and looks different to it. Or, to use a different analogy, I sometimes think that reading closely, reading critically is a bit like going to visit the optician.
00:13:56
Speaker
You know, they they they place different lenses in front of your eyes and they say, is it better with this one or without this one? With or without, with or without. Good criticism, I think, is about always switching those lenses.
00:14:08
Speaker
So sometimes you're taking a close-up view of something. Sometimes you're taking a step back to see it in a broader context. And you're always asking the same kind of question. Is it better with? Is it better with without?
00:14:21
Speaker
I mean, sidebar, but whenever I go stop to the optician, they're like, is this better with? I'm like, I don't know. Like, it looks the same to me. Like, I'm always a bit thrown off by that image as though, like, that I should see this profound shift. And I think maybe that's something about my reading as well. Maybe if we're using that analogy that I'm kind of like, whatever's in front of me, I go or I try to let the text take me more than imposing a kind of like frame, right?
00:14:44
Speaker
but But I think it might be that your experience in the optician is actually very close to the way that most of us read it. It's very unusual thing for us to have a sort transformational shift in the way that we understand the world as we read. it It's very wet we're unlikely to have that sort of coup de foudre, like sort of suddenly falling in love. You don't suddenly fall into a new way of...
00:15:05
Speaker
of thinking. it is It is usually much more cumulative, much more gradual. And sometimes that is built into the um the fibers of the work itself.
00:15:16
Speaker
Think about someone like Proust with these these long lingering sentences that gradually build up kind of lines of thought and patterns of thought as we read.
00:15:27
Speaker
The whole point about reading Proust is not you suddenly get that oh my god moment. Instead you get a kind of a slowly evolving kind of more developing kind of competence in how you understand big abstract messy things like love and that's sort of a point that the point is it's about slowly understanding things which are themselves about what takes time so no i think your optician is right and please That reminds me, actually, I finished this morning.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yes, listeners, I'm really far behind. But the first volume of the On the Calculation of Volume books by Solveig Bight, I think that's how you say her name. It's this series of books where a woman kind of wakes up and it's the 18th of November every day.
00:16:14
Speaker
oh And she's experiencing time kind of out of joint, whereas everyone else is just re-experiencing that one day. And she's like, why I've had, by the end of the first book, 365 these eighteenth Novembers.
00:16:26
Speaker
And there's lots of quotes on it from people like Conan Diaz and all these kind of authors. And they're saying like, the book is about noticing those kind of rifts in the everyday, right? How like a the day's texture. it really reminded me of that. Actually, the book is very quiet.
00:16:40
Speaker
There's like not much speech in it. It's very... slowly paced however I did gulp it down it is so consuming in it's kind of like ordinariness but in its ordinaryness you notice like oh the bird flew again in that same time and the rain started in the same way but then she starts to notice like is it colder this morning is the light a little bit different the moon looks different maybe it isn't different and it's those really subtle shifts I thought was like fantastic in that book it was amazing yeah and And the fact, I suppose, that that it's a um a reworking of the Hollywood movie Groundhog Day means that it shows how the same basic structures, um again, can go to the development of very, very different forms or tones or attitudes or or conclusions or styles in different contexts.
00:17:27
Speaker
kinds of writing. So in in some ways it's kind of enacting its own premise, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. The fact that they did this this this novel is it's kind of, yeah, it's practicing what it's preaching by saying you don't have to do it by having, you know, Bill Murray kind of girly towards it. You can do it just with a few sort of subtle shifts of syntax.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, really subtle. It did it it exactly felt like those like lens on lens off thing. And I was so absorbed and I was really trying to read it slowly. but there's something about the prose that really kind of like hooks you and you're kind of waiting for something dramatic to happen and it doesn't. And it's just like a higher wire act. Like she just writes some very plain sentences too. don't know. I thought it was amazing. I know everyone's been talking about these books for for a long time, but have finally got around to reading it.
00:18:15
Speaker
If we stick with like some of these like visual metaphors, you talk about a magnifying glass at one point in the book as as a kind of image for looking
Reading as an Exercise in Perspective
00:18:23
Speaker
closer. And then you say, You know, we start with magnifying glass and then we kind of slowly zoom out, like taking off on a plane is the other image you use, right? that You're kind of slowly kind of removing yourself away from the thing you see it in a kind of grander context. Could you like flesh that out for listeners who are kind of like, oh, that's nice image, but what does that mean in practice? How do i do that?
00:18:44
Speaker
Like literally how do that? So so so the the image I give is, um I say that reading can be a bit like sort of going on holiday where you you go through the airport departure kind of lounge um and you're consumed with kind of the nitty gritty details of kicking off your shoes security scanners and spritzing yourself with free samples of perfume.
00:19:05
Speaker
in Duty Free. And then finally, you settle down in your seat and you take off, you look down and all those kind of strange kind of clotted, kind of clogged bits of everyday life are put into perspective.
00:19:19
Speaker
Reading similarly asks you to think about the kind of nitty gritty kind of detail of each word, each phrase, each sentence as you stumble through it, as you make your way through each page.
00:19:32
Speaker
But also it gives you the opportunity to sit back and to see each moment in perspective within a larger structure where each small part takes its place.
00:19:44
Speaker
And I suppose the kind of close reading which I'm most interested in, that I find most useful, is where you do think about the impact of small local details, which can be a bit like keyholes through which you can see much bigger ideas, but also then recognising how those details combine into larger patterns or networks on the page and how does that work in practice well i suppose it leads to this process of zooming in zooming out then zooming in again so that we are always thinking about the relationship of the part to the whole or um the relationship of the detail to the pattern and and in doing that it helps us to answer
00:20:31
Speaker
the really key and kind obvious critical questions which we always have in our mind's eye but it's sometimes helpful to think about consciously questions like what and how and why like what is happening in this sentence now how is something as small as this particular word working in its context? and Why was this word chosen and not another one?
00:20:56
Speaker
and And those sorts of questions you can then build up yourself into a kind of critical network or kind of tissue so that as you carry on reading through the work,
00:21:08
Speaker
those those those local micro-questions then build up a bit like a um and sort of barrier reef, tiny, tiny details building up into kind of much, much bigger kind of structures.
00:21:21
Speaker
So one of the things then, as you're kind of like helping people through this process of like learning to read, but also maybe learning to reread, right? Learning to like redraw our attention to text in a kind of new way.
00:21:34
Speaker
And there are also some moments where you kind of zoom out a little bit yourself and think about what texts are doing in the world, what they can do for us as readers. So one of those that kind of comes a bit later, so I it was interesting, you say, but while books may include challenges to many aspects of our lives, so kind of like interrogating us, they begin by challenging themselves.
00:21:55
Speaker
They encourage a questioning attitude by first demonstrating it in their own way of going about things. So you're talking about texts kind of, you know, might make us think ah differently about something or new ways about the world, but you say they start that on the page themselves, right? They start interrogating, challenging themselves. Could you talk about this questioning? Like how does a text do that? Number one. And then what do we do with that as readers, right? Not every reader wants to be challenged by a book, for example. no. no How you think about that?
00:22:26
Speaker
No, I mean, the the reason that I'm cozy crime and, um, ah certain kind of genres like the old Mills and Boone romances, they're successful precisely because you what you're going to get.
00:22:38
Speaker
um And there is a certain kind of satisfaction to be had in that, just as there is in watching a procedural police drama on TV. And knowing that if you don't know from the beginning who done it, you know that the structure of the drama is going to be such that you will learn who done it and but but but by the end. um Well, to answer your question, i suppose the most obvious example would be a novel that, to use the word that's popularized by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, novel is dialogic.
00:23:11
Speaker
That, in other words, it includes several different perspectives on the same set of events, so that it is as if the novel is in dialogue with itself, and as it tries to work out the best way of presenting an idea to it and deciding that often the best way of doing that is a bit like a cubist painting.
00:23:34
Speaker
where you look at the same objects from lots of different perspectives to give a more kind of a richer and more kind of rounded a view of it. But but that I suppose that's more about ideas than a way of going about things. um but let's Let's take ah someone I've written a couple of books about, Dickens.
00:23:52
Speaker
and And his own name sounds like a plural noun, I sometimes think, Dickens. what What you get with a writer like Dickens is a whole series of different styles, which can range from melodrama to farce, from social criticism to slapstick.
00:24:11
Speaker
And these different styles take their turn on the page. And often they scrutinize or they... undercut each other as if the novel was really a way for all the different sides of Dickens's personality to be accommodated in a single bit of writing.
00:24:29
Speaker
It's why in a novel like at the old curiosity shop we have this um long lingering deathbed of little Nell, sorry plot spoiler, she dies, in which Dickens keeps drifting into a full prose blank verse.
00:24:43
Speaker
ti tumtytom titomtytomtytom The prose keeps going, as if he's trying to make it sound like a Shakespearean tragic drama, or like a sort of lofty Wordsworthian poem, or even kind of Miltonic kind of epic about innocence being lost.
00:25:00
Speaker
But then a couple of chapters later, we have um a bunch of kids kind of laughing and joking around. while their father is telling them the story of her death and going, yeah, terribly sad.
00:25:11
Speaker
But then, you know, after that, they sort of become quite happy again and sort of go on their merry way. so So even Dickens, at his most um sort of lachrymose, recognises that that's only one way of looking at that subject.
00:25:26
Speaker
The challenge for the reader then, though, is is how to work out what links all those different narrative turns together and whether they do show a more rounded, more nuanced view of life or or just an inability to stick to one way of looking at it.
00:25:40
Speaker
I mean, personally, I i think in in Dickens's case, it is the latter. And if I can quote the great critic, William Empson, at you, he wrote in one of his Stranger Books, an edition of some of Coleridge's poems he put together.
00:25:56
Speaker
He says that large societies need to include a variety of groups with different moral codes or scales of value.
00:26:06
Speaker
And it's part of the business of a writer to act as a go-between, so their differences are liable to become a conflict within himself. I think that's what a writer like Dickens does, and maybe it's what all good writers do.
00:26:20
Speaker
they They allow different voices, perspectives, values to come into contact within themselves. The word that Empson uses, conflict, sounds a bit Freudian to my ears. I would say it's more of a conversation or a collaboration rather than conflict. but but But either way, it means that a writer, particularly a fiction, isn't committed to only seeing the world through one pair of eyes. They can invent as many different characters, viewpoints as they want to give as multidimensional a view of the world as as they can.
00:27:00
Speaker
And then I guess with all that multitudinousness, that we have to do something with that, right, as a reader. Like if we are invested in the book, like we, you know, we we kind of have to ask ourselves, wait, where do I stand in relation to this thing?
00:27:14
Speaker
You know, is if there are a multiple conflicting or if there's friction in these different kinds of perspectives, different versions, different tones, like we have to do something with it, right? It's quite hard to let that wash over you when it isn't washing, right? When it's actually kind of rubbing up against what you think the book is.
00:27:30
Speaker
And actually, talking of Dickens, we had a good ah episode on the opening of A Christmas Carol with um Professor Holly Furnow, who you may know. I do. and we And we we talked about that opening and the number of different kind of registers and tones in that opening.
00:27:46
Speaker
And even Holly, who was like, you know, Dickens Scholar Supreme, was like, wait, I don't even remember this like word here. was like, even I have become kind of accustomed to just rereading this quite quickly. But we slowed down so much, maybe too much, that you could feel all these different kind of inferences and influences and kind of like, well, that's like a really, that's clearly a comedy bit.
00:28:05
Speaker
And then it goes straight back into kind of more kind of Gothic horror. And then it goes back to kind of social critique and then it zooms out again, all within a few lines. And we were really kind of reinvested in how many things he's doing in like one page.
00:28:18
Speaker
Absolutely. And i wouldn I wouldn't for a moment claim that a book is like, um you know, Clark Kent's telephone box, where you enter it as one person, you end up as healthy. That's not how it works.
00:28:30
Speaker
But it can be a form of, fun what's the phrase, cosplay, I suppose, in which from... voice to voice, sometimes from centre to centre, sometimes in the yes sometimes from from phrase to phrase, it allows us to experiment with other ways of thinking without committing to them.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's very rare that we have that opportunity in real life to ah be someone else without having to be someone else. That is what that kind of imaginative literature gives us. I saw um an Instagram post a couple of months ago that said your bookshelf is a memory of everyone you've been, which I thought was lovely, which is true, but it's also true your bookshelf is an invitation to everyone you might become.
00:29:13
Speaker
and and and this is where books, I think, are different to other forms of, well, let's say entertainment, like TikTok videos or major motion pictures. when you When you see a video, when you see a film, you're enjoying something that's already been filtered through someone else's imagination.
00:29:31
Speaker
Whereas when you read a story, you bring it to life in your head and you then become a co-creator rather than just a passive consumer. And that means that you can experiment with these different ways of thinking, of behaving, of being as a way of testing the ground, sounding things out.
00:29:52
Speaker
And then possibly ah part of that then sinks into you and it becomes you. That's really interesting. And it makes me think of a couple of things. One is I've been trying to scrutinize your books behind you, but because your picture isn't the most clear, the only one I can make out is The Little Friend by Donna Tartt, because I know that I anywhere on that copy to see what to see what books are kind of making you. It's interesting that because, um so I'm talking to you from home. If I i was talking to you from my my my college room where where I teach, you would see that there would be all the heavyweight kind of literary classics.
00:30:27
Speaker
It would be like a sort of working library for someone who teaches everything from the romantics to the present day. What you see behind me is basically review copies. What you see is the kind of the working library of someone who gets thrown a book, given a couple of weeks, has to come up with 800 words, and then sticks it on his shelf and never looks at it again.
00:30:48
Speaker
Which isn't to say it hasn't affected the way I think about everything else, including the next book on the list, but it does suggest that we all have different sides to us as readers. And this is that's where my professional side, whereas the library where i work might be different kind of side. Yeah, a different professional side. Yeah, different different kinds of shelves for different parts of us The thing I was thinking about in terms of kind of changing us or making us think differently when we read is about empathy.
00:31:16
Speaker
And it's a word that I'm very interested in. Talk about it a lot. I'm doing a cancelling course at the moment and like empathy empathy is a word that gets talked about every week. And I'm like, could we dig into it intellectually? it's like, no, no, it's just a thing.
00:31:30
Speaker
And I really want to kind of tease it out. And you talk a little bit in the book about, you know, stepping into another person's mind or another person's shoes or seeing things maybe from their perspective. And a couple of episodes ago, i had Elaine Castillo on who in her book, How to Read Now, kind of really skewers the model of empathy that I think people are used to giving. I'm not saying it's the one that you're doing in this book, but one that often we hear about when we hear about like you read and then you gain empathy. Yeah.
00:31:57
Speaker
And she says, i'm going to read a long quote, everyone, so sorry. But she says, the idea that fiction builds empathy is one of incomplete politics left hanging by probably good intentions. The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake, favorite image, such that reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense and produces a superficial effect.
00:32:25
Speaker
The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things, which is to say as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of colour into little more than ethnographers, personal trainers, to continue the metaphor.
00:32:48
Speaker
The result is that we largely end up going to writers colour to learn the specific and go to white writers to feel the universal. Anyway, she goes on and on. It's like a brilliant essay that I mean, everyone needs to go buy that book. But that essay in particular is like really good on thinking about empathy in terms of kind of like otherness, I guess, is her framework here, right? About people who are different from us and going to fiction to do that.
00:33:12
Speaker
She kind of says, like, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don't really have empathy because empathy is not a one stop destination. this isn't yeah This is just a, do you have thoughts on this? How do you feel about it?
00:33:24
Speaker
You know, there there's part of this book that is really kind of suggesting that books can like make us different, right? They can do things to us if we read in a particular way. And I just wonder, yeah, how you feel about that, how you feel about empathy as an idea more generally. It's like a small part of the book, really, but I just't want i just want to hear your thoughts, really.
00:33:43
Speaker
I mean, I think she's right to be suspicious. There's, i mean, Martha Nussbaum, the the the great American philosopher and literary critic, has a chapter of one of her books called Reading for Life, in which she quotes a famous bit of David Copperfield, where David talks about being a young boy and stocking up his imagination by reading some classics when he's been cut off from ah playing with the other boys but he doesn't say reading for life he says reading as if for life so he recognizes as perhaps her chapter title doesn't that it's not a straightforward transfer of close reading and getting closer to other people and at the end of my book um I talk about the rather awkward case of Joseph Stalin
00:34:32
Speaker
who was a great bibliophile.
Reading and Empathy
00:34:34
Speaker
um He read and annotated hundreds of pages every day. And there's precious little evidence that made him a more sympathetic, morally nuanced thinker. And if anything, as I think I'd say, he seems to be able to separate out the world of reading from the world of practical action or need ethical reflection and to to forget that his own words had a direct effect on other people's lives. so So no, no, reading more, reading more carefully won't necessarily make us better in an ethical sense, even if it makes us better readers.
00:35:06
Speaker
What I would say to push back against that, though, is that it's not, I don't think, it's a question of either or. So some people who exercise will drop dead of a heart attack, but we don't use that as a reason to tell other people to stop exercising.
00:35:22
Speaker
And there's the recent study by the charity, The Queen's Reading Room, that used brain scans to show that just five minutes of reading cuts stress by nearly 20%, you can improve focus by 11%, and indeed other exercises, other experiments have shown that our powers of empathy are indeed improved, at least in terms of brain activity, the bits of our brain which um fire the sort of empathetic centres when we read.
00:35:52
Speaker
than when we don't read. But I would say that that's not the only the acid test of whether good books can make us better. I mean, Hazlitt, William Hazlitt, the great romantic essayist, said that when he was in the natural world, he always had plenty of company because of the fields and the wildlife all around him. And he said, I'm never less alone than when alone.
00:36:14
Speaker
That is also true of us as readers, I think. We are also never alone, less alone than when alone. So is that an example of reading making us better, ethically speaking? No, but it makes us feel better.
00:36:27
Speaker
there's There's, again, another quotation. There's that very famous line by Samuel Johnson where he says that the only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
00:36:40
Speaker
And I think you could say the same about reading. ah Are good readers necessarily going to be good in other ways? No, not necessarily. Does better reading make for a better communication, conversation, better understanding?
00:36:54
Speaker
Often, but no, not always. Does it make us more um morally nuanced and sympathetic? I look at some of my colleagues and I would say definitely not. um but we are we naming names here Robert or not yet not yet not on air but books we have to remember books are invitations they are when we open they are literally open invitations they are not instruction manuals yeah how we respond to those invitations is is is up to us but the books themselves aren't going to do anything to us unless you know we pick them up and hit ourselves overhead with them Yeah, I want to transition in a second to talk about your writing practice and ah sure and
Organic Structure of 'Look Closer'
00:37:35
Speaker
questions about that. But I wondered, how did you decide upon the structure of this book? Like, how did you put it together?
00:37:41
Speaker
How did you know which examples to go to? Like, obviously, you know, you teach widely, you've reviewed widely, but... you know like Were you thinking of like some like this book has to be in there or that text has to be there? How were you finding your way through you know the history of like pretty much Western literature? Where do you begin?
00:38:00
Speaker
i know but and or where to end? exactly um It turns out that i'm mean completely by chance, completely by fluke, that the examples I chose spanned exactly 400 years. because the the earliest one 1623, Shakespeare's Folio, To Be or Not To Be.
00:38:14
Speaker
The last one is 2023, a short story, a sort of queer fairy tale from a Canadian writer. Well, it sounds a bit capital R romantic, I know, but almost everything I've written in the past few years has developed organically, if I dare say that, until it reaches what seems to be the right sort of shape for material. And then when it does, I go back and I bash it around a bit and I polish it up.
00:38:40
Speaker
So the structure that I've arrived at seems to be the only one that was possible all along. But that's not how it came to be. so I'll give you a couple of quick quick examples. I wrote a book um in 2015 called The Story of Alice, which was all about Lewis Carroll and his invention of Wonderland. And it occurred to me when I was about but halfway through writing what were sort of short, punchy chapters, that it was going to become a book of 42 chapters. 42 being the number that Lewis Carroll was completely obsessed with.
00:39:07
Speaker
and comes back to again and again and again. And it it also turns out that the 42 in a kind of mathematical sequence that he would have quite liked, being a mathematician, fell into a set of six, and then a set of 12, and a set of 24.
00:39:22
Speaker
So that each section of the book was kind of doubling in size as I was following Alice herself kind of growing up, culturally speaking, over 200 odd years, 250 odd years.
00:39:33
Speaker
So that that was one example where that the structure sort of I arrived at in the act of writing it. And then looking back, it seemed to be the only one possible. but More recently, I wrote a ah sort of slapstick memory memoir, misery memoir called Metamorphosis. It was all about being diagnosed with MS.
00:39:51
Speaker
And then this rather brutal treatment I had, a stem cell transplant. And as I was writing that book, I kept snagging on, my man kept snagging on the fact that patients call the day when your stem cells are returned to your body day zero.
00:40:07
Speaker
And that was clearly going to be the centre of the book. That was going to be the stone you drop into the pond regularly. and see where the ripples spread. And then from that, it seemed natural to count down to zero and then count up from zero.
00:40:21
Speaker
So it begins with something like chapter 34, it's 33, 32, 31, 30, down to zero, and then up one, two three, four, five, six um So again, it's something I arrived at in the act of writing.
00:40:35
Speaker
And it seemed to be the the natural obvious solution, even though, of course, it wasn't really. This book, um look closer. It began as as an autobiographical sketch that I put on Facebook about me learning to read. And I didn't quite know I did it.
00:40:51
Speaker
Maybe it was National Book Day or something, but it was just a sort of couple of hundred words. And then that led to a slightly bigger piece of writing. Then that led to another chapter and that chapter onto another one in a kind of daisy chain effect.
00:41:07
Speaker
which I thought did suggest how one book does lead to another on our on our shelves, but also in our lives, and not always in a logical or ordered or coherent way.
00:41:18
Speaker
so So that's one of the reasons why it follows the structure it does. But obviously, there's a bit of strategy going on there as well. So as I was writing it, And as the chapters did seem to fall naturally into these bigger blocks that you mentioned, kind of three or four chapters per block, I did have to keep making sure there was a decent range of writers that was represented in terms of,
00:41:42
Speaker
genre, periods, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and so on. Because particularly when you're writing this kind of book, the last thing you want to do is to make it look as if you're just trying to please yourself.
00:41:55
Speaker
Especially if the book's are supposed to be a way of encouraging other people to explore other books they might not have come across before or might have heard of but not read themselves very closely.
00:42:05
Speaker
So a mixture, I would say that the structure, the pattern, the um even the style, a mixture of serendipity and strategy. h I wish my writing with that serendipitous, it feels more toiling.
00:42:20
Speaker
Do you have a writing practice? Like where are you writing? are you always typing? do you have coffee? Like, is there a usual setup or are you writing when you can write in between teaching and all the rest of it?
00:42:35
Speaker
I tend to stick to the university holidays for writing, where I can build up more of a head of steam rather than dropping it into an hour or two here or there.
00:42:47
Speaker
In terms of how I do it, I mean, to be honest, until about seven or eight years ago, ah used to write um fragments in notebooks.
00:42:57
Speaker
And then the fragments would be translated into physical fragments, bits of paper. I then shuffle into the right sequence. And then sometimes that sequence would then be transcribed in another bit of handwritten sort of material. And then that immensely detailed plan would be such that the writing of the book was on the computer was really just transcribing what existed in in sort of scraps and fragments.
00:43:22
Speaker
What's changed? like so I mentioned ah the fact that i have MS. When I was diagnosed, one the things that's changed is my handwriting has become almost impenetrable to me, let alone to anyone else.
00:43:33
Speaker
so So these days, the way I write it, it's more like a kind of slow motion explosion. where I might start with something very small, like that memoir of learning to read.
00:43:44
Speaker
And then I add notes and then notes to the notes and I move ideas around on a computer. I add more fragments. Eventually the thing starts to take some kind of rough and unready shape.
00:43:57
Speaker
And then eventually when I think I've got something that looks a bit like a rough draft, that's when I polish and I polish and I polish again. And so I don't know what I'm like as a writer. I'm a much better a rewriter than I as a writer.
00:44:12
Speaker
And when I get to that stage, I aim for probably round a standard thousand words a day if it's more than I'm grateful but but at that stage it's a question of taking what is well it's not like Michelangelo's you imprisoning marble and the statues is it's actually not like that it's it's much more like bits of trying to jigsaw puzzle you're trying smack into place and and then try and fill it in the cracks so that there's a single picture all along I think like that idea of writing and then rewriting or editing or whatever. I saw Sheila Hetty live a year or so ago and someone asked her the difference between writing and editing and they asked, is editing writing? And she was just like, no
00:44:55
Speaker
And that that's all she said. And they were like, do you want to say more? Like, as in it's not right. She's like, well, no, it's editing. Writing is writing. Editing is editing. Ask me another question. And it just lingers in my head. It's so funny that yeah they were different creative acts, I guess, for her. Like the one is the production of words and the other was almost like making sense of the words, which she saw as quite divergent activities in her brain.
00:45:20
Speaker
which Which is, again, i mentioned kind of romantic ideas. that That is itself a very romantic idea, isn't it? That you you are inspired to produce the first rough draft. And then as Shelley says, when composition begins, inspiration is on the decline.
00:45:35
Speaker
So um you try and capture as much of the original burst of inspiration as you can in language. And then you fill in the gaps later or you polish off the um the edges or you um yeah you fill in the cracks. ah I'm not a romantic in that sense. i I tend to think through the acts of writing.
00:45:55
Speaker
um my My hero here is some Ian Forster. Ian Forster, who says in, well, he quotes another writing aspect of the novel. saying how do I know what I think until I see what I say?
00:46:06
Speaker
And that's absolutely true me. I don't know what I'm thinking until I try to put these vague, incoherent thoughts into the sense-making structures of language. And then when I've got something written down, I might then change my mind. so I might sort of revise it or polish it or upend it or subvert it in some other way. but But that's the raw material which I'm working with. It's not as if I have the ideas and then I find the words for them.
00:46:31
Speaker
No, the words themselves often are ways of finding better versions of the ideas. m That's fascinating. In this book, you talked about an early memory of reading. Do you have an early memory of writing? Did you know you were going to write at some point? Was that always kind of on the cards for you, do you think?
00:46:49
Speaker
I'd say probably not, no. So um ah the book i I mentioned a few minutes ago, ah the sort of memoir I wrote called Metamorphosis, um in In that, there's a chapter where I talk about um having to write having to write stories at school, you know, homework assignments.
00:47:06
Speaker
And the fact that when I look up back at my school exercise book now, those stories are full. It's like crazy paving. It's full of ellipses. This then dot, dot, dot. Later, dot, dot. dot And then dot, dot, dot, dot. dot dot And those are moments where my imagination was running dry, clearly.
00:47:22
Speaker
The great thing about nonfiction, which is where I've ended up, especially biography, is that usually someone else has already come up with a plot. So your job is just to turn that plot of someone's life into a truthful or interesting narrative.
00:47:38
Speaker
and And many of the people listening will know that lovely line in in the History Boys, the Alan Bennett play, where a character says there are moments in reading where you come across something, a thought, of feeling a feeling, way of looking at things which you had thought special and particular to you.
00:47:54
Speaker
Now here it is set down by someone else. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours. I think biography and then criticism as well, if it's if it's done well, this is a way of taking that hand and placing it in the hand of another reader.
00:48:10
Speaker
And and that that's the kind of writing which I by by most enjoy, most admire. That's really fascinating. The last question I ask everyone is for book recommendations. As many as you won new things, old things, things not out yet, given that you do get sent a lot of ah new books. Anything you want to recommend to listeners would be amazing.
00:48:31
Speaker
So, um and I'm going to cheat, and I'm going to cheat your listeners by saying, I don't think I am going to recommend a book to someone I don't know. what What I would recommend though is, and and this is my advice to myself, which I have to remind myself of all the time, is is to read as widely as possible till you find something that,
00:48:49
Speaker
that speaks to you or even seems to speak for you in a way that you know you might send a valentine's card to someone that expresses feelings you recognize as your own but you couldn't have come with on your own i think that your reading can be like that as well that if i recommend a novel and then somebody listens to this podcast reason because that was dreadful that's because it's not it's not the right book for them yeah and And so I wouldn't say it's helpful, but but it's it's it's like, ah yeah, you can voyage with a map, but the journey is going to be your own. And so I would say to do do the journey yourself.
00:49:25
Speaker
Robert, thank you so much for your time today. i really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode. For more on the practice of reading, go back to episode 25 with Dan Sinekyn and Johanna Wannant. Or for more on Dickens, go to episode 21 with Holly Feneau.
00:49:44
Speaker
And to hear Elaine Castillo, go back to episode 22. Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube and share with people in all the places. Follow the show and me on Instagram, tag me in any posts of episodes that you like, and please do fill out the feedback form that's linked in the show notes. You can get more information by subscribing to the Substack.
00:50:07
Speaker
This show was made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.