It is simple enough to say that since books have classes--fiction,biography,poetry------we should separate them and take from each what is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering , of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be this fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back ,and reserve, and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist, and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel----if we consider how to read a novel first----are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks, reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write, to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you---how at the corner of the street, perhaps, your passed two people talking, a tree shook, an electric light danced, the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic, a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. by Virginia Woolf (1882--1941)