The Figment of the Author
How should one read a book? VirginiaWoolf first asked this question nearly a century ago, but the years have, if anything, made the question more, not less urgent. Books about how to read (a poem, a novel) periodically appear, as do books-How Proust Can Change Your Life, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Little Chinese Seamstress-chronicling the emotional and political benefits of reading. There are even books, like Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, that suggest how not to read a book and still get some benefit from it. Finally there are books that promise that anyone can become a reader, even the Queen of England, as happens in Alan Bennett's droll fantasy, The Uncommon Reader, in which Her Majesty, to the surprise of her subjects and the chagrin of her retinue, develops a late-life passio ... read full excerpt from Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography ebook
