September 21, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:Ideally . . .
Aaron Haspel has a lovely piece on the ideal reader.
An ideal reader often writes about his author, but he is too near him, temperamentally, to play the judicious critic. He reads the author as the author would want to be read, not as others would want to read him.
At the end of the post he asks "Who is your ideal reader? For whom are you the ideal reader?"
These are good questions. I am not sure I have good answers. I suspect that my ideal reader is Tyler Cowen, though he might well dispute that. For whom am I an ideal reader? Possibly no one. I am shallow, eclectic, and too prone to my own flights of fancy to strike anyone serious as an ideal reader; but there are few popular authors that I love enough for them to love my reading of them. Perhaps I was only an ideal reader when I was a child, able to submerge myself wholly in passionate reverie with my authors. In which case I suspect that I was ideal for L.M. Montgomery, whose heroic and often laboured choice of romanticism over the bleak sadness that underlies her writing (and her life) sing to me still, though more softly than they once did.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 21, 2006 10:55 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>This is analogous to asking who your ideal customer is. While companies spend gobs of money to answer this question, have authors done this (beyond aquiring their literary niche)?
Posted by: Half Canadian on September 21, 2006 12:35 PMI can think of a few authors for whom I've been an ideal reader. However, there are none still living for whom I was an ideal reader of all their output. To phrase it more clearly, authors change over time; early Shakespeare is very different from late-period. A single reader is unlikely to be ideal for the entire range of a writer's career.
Posted by: Shelby on September 21, 2006 1:08 PMJane,
You are undoubtedly many things, but shallow is not one of them. Self deprecation, like self praise, stinks.
You are who you are; and, we are all here frequently because of it. The time spent by a large number of obviously highly intelligent people reading and commenting on your "flights of fancy" should be enough to convince you.
I consider myself to be an ideal reader, because I'm a real fanatic of good books!!! :) Even when I visit another country, I always find there somethig interesting to read!!! This time the same happened: I were in the Emirates and found in the Dubai hotel I stayed in a very rich library!!! It was a pleasant present for me and nobody could pull me away from reading!!! :)
Posted by: massyandra on September 25, 2006 6:23 AM