Learning to Read: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

This is the exact perfect book of its kind, and I don't know of other books of its kind. The kind of book it is, is a practical guide for reading stories. For someone like me, who didn't take any formal classes on reading since AP Lit, I often fall into the trap of trying to understand novels by "figuring out" the "hidden message" that converts the story into an allegory, with each component simply representing some other thing. There are stories where that is true - and after an initial thrill, those stories are some of the most disappointingly shallow. Once you've unlocked its secret, what is there left to think about?

There are other frameworks that we are implicitly taught when evaluating a story. One is that we should be looking for the lesson that the story is trying to teach us. This framework has the advantage of being the same one that many storytellers are using to write the story. But it is equally likely to lead to misunderstanding a given story, even one that seems to beg to be read in that way. I have completely misunderstood entire bible stories (or, um, Book of Mormon stories) because I was straining so hard to put it into a lesson-shaped box.

While I've understood for a long time the weakness of these modes of reading, before reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (henceforth ASIAPITR), I didn't have a good replacement framework, so my mind would still gravitate to the same questions: what does it mean? What do these characters signify? What should I learn? The answers to these questions were never satisfying because it is a narrowing process that leaves us with little of what makes the story great. It is an intellectual exercise, instead of an emotional journey.

Stories interest us not because they are the most efficient way for a person to communicate a message or teach a lesson. They interest us because of the way that they make us feel. The utilitarian urge to make stories useful probably comes from a good place inside of us, but it obscures and confuses the real point of a good story: provoking our basic human emotions. The beauty of ASIAPITR is that it supplies tools that help you to focus your attention on the story itself, enabling you to dive deeper into the emotional complexities that a good story generates.

Paying close attention to how a story works is what lets the emotions land. The tools that ASIAPITR provides for doing this are strikingly simple. They are questions you can ask yourself while reading that strip away the frameworks and push you toward the story itself: 1. What pins are in the air at this point? 2. What do I think is going to happen next? 3. What am I curious about? 4. What has caused the action in the story? 5. What patterns have I noticed? 6. What is escalating?

These questions are so simple as to seem almost not worth considering. But for me it has been a useful corrective, as I have noticed that my mind skips over these questions in search of some secret deeper meaning. By going deep on these basics, it has been possible for me to deepen my own understanding of a story, my connection with it, and my emotional reaction to it.

Most of the fun of reading ASIAPITR comes from the interactive format, where Saunders walks the reader through several classic Russian stories and slowly removes the training wheels. By the end, I felt much more confident in my ability to understand the story without as much guidance. Plus, all of the stories are a total joy to read in and of themselves. And that experience, of feeling the intense pleasure of reading a great story, is exactly the point.