How do you read a book? Like most people, I still decipher the meaning of words printed on sheets of paper bound together, but you may prefer to peer at pixels on a screen or listen through ear buds to a favorite narrator. They are all reading, in my book. Each of us, I think, seeks what the critic Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text,” though finding delight in what we read doesn’t necessarily mean a steady diet of romance novels and thrillers. Scholarly works, serious fiction, poetry, a writer’s distinctive prose style — all of these deliver their own kinds of textual pleasure.
