what closely reading ruins

spoiler alert: it's not the story

I’m on a bit of a ramble today—thoughts ping-ponging around in my mind and instead of my usual dismissal of that energy until I can find the “right time” for it, I am sitting down with a plate of orange slices to write it down as it’s coming to me. A bit raw, a little angry. Right onto the page.

Without further ado…

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When I first started learning how to closely read in college, I heard peers complaining:

“Reading closely ruins the story for me!”

“Ugh, this is so dumb, it’s just the color of the wallpaper. It has nothing to do with the meaning of the story!”

“I just like reading for fun. You’re overthinking it.”

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Comments like these pained me.

(Perhaps especially because I find “overthinking” things to be a delightful way to spend my time.)

I’d grown up with a very specific model of close reading: to find what I was already trained to look for and to ignore everything else that even hinted at other interpretations.

I was taught this method at church, where asking questions about why a woman was being stoned in the first place was “not the right question to be asking,” or why it was the woman’s fault a man spied on her taking a bath was “missing the point of the story.”

The truth was I always had an instinct for closely reading. But those who were teaching me didn’t necessarily want me to foster my curiosity. Many of them wanted me to read the story as they wanted it to be read.

And they wanted that so I would believe what they believed.

Safety in numbers and what have you.

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I started wondering, each semester as a new batch of college students from a similar sociological and religious background railed against “closely reading” and put layers of Post-It notes over the “pornography” in their art history books, if they’d ever let themselves have a thought of their own.

I grew angry. But not at them. I was furious with the people who had raised them (and me) to fear art and stories.¹ These are the same people who, these days, support banning books about freckles or non-nuclear families or awareness of what body parts are actually called.

I thought:

If reading closely “ruins” a story for you, perhaps you were enjoying—and benefitting from—a very different story than the one that was actually written.

If you think details in a story just happen to be there and have nothing to do with any of the story’s meanings, I wonder where and how you find any meaning at all.

And if analysis is the opposite of fun for you, well, then, you’ve got a rather easy (and quiet, seamless, changeless, deeply fearful) life ahead of you, my friend.

I thought: no wonder they hate close reading.

Close reading is precisely the kind of freedom that the caged love to rage against.

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Stories are ecosystems of ideas. They are carefully scaffolded in order to give you a world that makes sense (or critically does not make sense, for a reason).

Badly constructed worlds—where the ideas don’t click together—are worlds where character falls flat. Motivation lacks. Plot puts the pedal to the metal and never lets setting lead the way. But even poorly crafted literary worlds are worth closely reading.

Cruelly constructed worlds—where violence reigns gratuitous and hateful ideologies run unchecked and liars think they’re actually smarter than everyone else—are failures of imagination. Their scaffolding reveals disdain for the very people meant to read it. It reveals a mean trickery meant to inspire followers and worshippers, rather than critical thinkers with boundaries. These, too, are worth closely reading.

Because reading all sorts of things—the bad, the cruel, the excellent, the literary, the nonsensical, the modernist, the experimental, the easy, the fluffy—that’s how you find out what you like. What you believe. What you want to read more of and what you’ll DNF indefinitely. Who you support. What kind of life you want to have. Which direction you’d like to bend in the wide pendulum swing of history.

When close reading “ruins” a story for you, I hate to tell you this, but it didn’t really ruin the story.

It revealed your beliefs about what you think a story should do.

It took a wrecking ball your fantasies about what stories should be allowed to do and reminds you that stories are, well, bigger than you. They’re not just for you. They’re not only meant to reflect you back to you, or tell you what you already know, or make sure the only thing you ever feel is comfy cozy.

While some stories feel like a mirror—reflecting ourselves or our beliefs or our worlds back to us with a keen accuracy—most stories are actually windows. After all, even the most accurate mirror still flips us ‘round in the reflection, offering not a true depiction of things as they are, but an inversion.

You see: even by closely reading the function of a mirror, we are invited to challenge our fantasy that mirrors depict “real life” back to us.

That’s why I think even the stories that mirror us are also windows.

It’s also why I think of closely reading as an action and the way we take action. We read (that’s the action)—and when we read closely (that’s the how), the window of a story appears. It has a chance to become like J.M. Barrie’s portal to Neverland. Where, when we dare to take a step off that ledge, we realize we are boundless. We realize that, against all odds and laws of gravity and the universe, we can fly.

Stories offer us the opportunity to reflect, yes, but also to move through a new world in a new way that takes us somewhere we hadn’t been before—whether it was into a realm of magical realism or into our own childhood memories or through a belief system that has governed our minds for decades.

A story—and your powerful decision to read it closely—can be the release valve. Can be a smack of truth. Can remind you that the world is so much bigger than so many people want you to believe. A story can set you free not just from what others want you to believe, but even the things you have internalized. It can shake you up, make you strange to yourself, give you the gift of a second chance.

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You see, I don’t just share about closely reading here because I find it a fruitful way to combat the brain-rot of fully digitized culture. (Though it is that.)

I don’t do it for myself because it’s the calmest, most settled state I can find within my anxiety-riddled mind. (Though it certainly provides that.)

I closely read—almost every day, as often as I can muster the energy for it, and even on days when I can’t—because it reminds me that there is a little bit of magic in this world. Fleeting, often silent, sometimes too easy to miss.

And it is not the magic of stories themselves. The magic is not the window.

The magic is your willingness to go open that window.

It flurries within your decision to stay with every pulse and beat of the narrative and believe it.

It is the power of belief—that willing suspension of your disbelief, your momentary refusal to wave the impossible away—that makes real magic.

The power is in stories, yes, but it is also in you.

Closely reading helps you see that power. Recognize it. Honor it. Live by it. Perhaps even to believe in yourself. In your own radical magic.

Then I think:

No wonder there are so many people who don’t want you to do it. No wonder there are so many in the world who want to take it away from you; who don’t even want it to exist.

And then I realize:

It’s important that we do it anyway.

‘Til next time, happy reading

1. Just yesterday, I was watching an online streamer play my favorite video game. No content violations occurred during a violent zombie mob scene; none occurred during a scene in which a young woman is assaulted. But the stream was momentarily flagged for “profanity” when two women kissed at a community dance.