Good Readers and Good Writers- Passages that capture attention

Several passages captured my attention from Vladimir Navokov's essay "Good Readers and Good Writer". The first of which is the definitions of a good reader: memory, imagination, a dictionary, and some artistic sense (2). I agree with this, so it was interesting to see that on a quiz, college students mostly answered that a good reader should focus on emotional identification, action and the social-economics or historic angle. Something else that caught my attention is that when reading a book, the person should identify the book with himself or herself in the stead of the book's character (3). I thought that this was interesting because many of the books that I have read I would read I would read the story imagining that I was the protagonist. This told me that I have been reading books the wrong way all of my life...great. Another thing that I thought was interesting, mainly because I know it to be true is that a reader needs both patience and passion in order to enjoy literature. When reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, I had the passion but sometimes lacked the patience. However, when I had both, the novel was much more enjoyable. The final phrase that caught my attention is "In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine" (4). This stood out to me because the idea of someone reading with their spine sounded strange to me. I believe that this phrase could be an element of language and the ones before it were ideas.

Navokov, Vladimir. Good Readers and Good Writers. 1948. Web. July-Aug. 2011.