The Art of X-Ray Reading (2016)

Clark, Roy Peter. The Art of X-Ray Reading. Little, Brown, and Company, 2016.

Another book that follows in the wake of Mortimer Alder's How to Read a Book (1940) and Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind (2003, 2015). Behind the snazzy title is good old-fashioned close reading. Clark's book goes beyond an explication of a reading method, however, giving it a closer antecedent in Thomas C. Foster's fantastic How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003). Both authors guide the reader through an informed close reading of numerous classics, mostly from the American literary canon. This affords the reader indispensable insight into the tools of a seasoned reader. At the heart of both books is the simple truth that close, deep, fruitful reading of great literature comes "[w]ith age and multiple readings...." (Clark). Foster boils it down to memory, symbol, and pattern, which, of course, come only out of reading great literature over and over throughout one's life. Where the books differ, however, is that Clark's intended readers are not just readers but writers, so each chapter distills the results of x-ray reading down to concrete writing advice. After a warm and casual introduction, the book begins with an x-ray reading of The Great Gatsby, or, rather, an x-ray reading of a very small excerpt of the American classic. The book ends with everyone's current favorite literary form: lists! There is a list of great sentences from famous authors and the mandatory suggested reading list.