-Babble-

What's the proper way to read a book? We start at the beginning and finish at the end- could that be called reading? To fully qualify to 'know' a language one must not only speak it with fluency , s/he must also be able to write what s/he speaks and read and understand other written work. How much do we understand when we read? It is said that as soon as a person starts to read, the author is dead- in the sense that as soon as I start bringing my own values and relate my own experience to a fictious text; the ideas, values and the experience originally expressed by the author cease to exist. Of course, this is no way my theory, I'm merely stating someone else's statement mixed with some of my own understanding. This is why it's so hard to do or think up something original.

Anyway, back to reading. So the overall process is something like - a string of letters that form words represent objects in our daily life - some special words within a sentence give the objects individual attributes (action and description). The reader then process all these by placing them within a defined context, making sense out of what once were simple letters.

Our brain has the tendency to fill in the gaps for us. So essentially most of us don't need to look up that strange word in the dictionary to make sense out of a sentence. Of course, knowing that particular word would most likely heighten the sense of meaning. However, most of us (or is it just me?) never in a million years would open up a dictionary and check. There's a good reason behind it too. Once that 'reading-flow' comes along, it's hard to look elsewhere but the book, let alone taking the time out to consult a dictionary - which is always ever so tedius, despite the great 'dic-skills' someone might have. In a 'flow-ed' state skipping one sentence would no way harm the overall intended meaning {and believe me, one attribute for good readers is that they never need to manually read a whole word, for some words the brain automatically does it for us}. Hence the notion of let's-not-consult-a-dictionary. Truth be told, I've only found out the EXACT meaning of 'reluctant' a few weeks ago. Frankly speaking, having a vague idea about that words' meaning was never a hindrance to my understanding.

I started reading 'Arabian Nights' last night and for some reason my brain would not register a word of the only two lines I read. When I tried again tonight, I realised there were just too many words in one sentence I didn't know the meaning to. So, I opened up a dictionary and tried to locate the word 'Verily'. I failed. Now, I have no doubt about my 'dic-skills' I picked up at a very early age, so that is definitely not the case of my failure. I tried the word 'very' to see if the fat book offered me that other word, and for some reason, be it the poor lighting of the crappy table lamp that I have or perhaps the fat book itself that was to blame, I had no luck!