Are there any Good Readers & Writers?

Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers"

What does it take to be a good reader? According to Vladimir Nabokov in “Good Readers and Good Writers” a good reader is one who “has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense”. How exactly does a person with those characteristics automatically become a good reader? I can understand if you have a good imagination and some artistic sense that you might be able to “go there” and feel as if you are a character in the book. Where exactly does a dictionary come in handy if you are reading a book; for the most part you will understand and know most words in a book that you are choosing to read. There isn’t any one person better at reading than the next, unless that person doesn’t know how to read period. When you read anything it’s your perception of what you are reading that will make read it.

What is a good writer? Mr. Nabokov says in “Good Readers and Good Writers”, “Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not.” Jane Austen is known to be a good writer, do we take that away from her because she lived in a clergyman’s parlor, but wrote about all sorts of beautiful romances in London? This is the very thing that he says you need to have to be a good reader, so why does this not apply to being a good writer? If I sold 100 million copies of a book I wrote, 100 million people would think that I’m a good writer. Again, your perception will determine if you are a good writer because if I think I’m a good writer than I am, no matter what anyone else has to say about it.

There are no guidelines that anyone can write to say that you are a good reader if you can do this, this, and this. The same goes for writing. There are some things though that will factor into you being considered a good writer. Not necessarily a good reader though, there is no way to determine a good reader.

Defense:

I chose to include the micro-theme we did on Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers”, because I think the topic was interesting. I didn’t revise it because I felt my feelings and opinions are valid; and the questions I posed would probably spark some pretty good debates. While I was reading my original response for probably the third or fourth time, I still would like to know what makes a good reader or writer. The world in my eyes is a good and bad place because of perception. I may perceive our nation to be the greatest nation on earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the truth. Therefore, when a person reads a book, the outcome of the book, rather good or bad can only be perceived by the person reading the book at that time. What I mean by that is, if ten people read the same book, there will likely be at least five different opinions of what that book was about. I think that is awesome because if we all thought the same way, that means we would all be the same, and this world would be boring.