STRIVE TO BE #10 ON THIS LIST OF READER PERSONALITY TYPES

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Readers animate texts. They transform books from objects to energy through the leaps, connections, moods, associations, and more evoked by static print on the page. Every writer has a reader in mind when they compose, even if that reader is just herself or society’s indifference. While each reader is unique, most people can be categorized as one of the following 9 common book reader types, and a select few can be considered the rare bookworm at the end of this list.

1. THE FAD READER

Harry Potter is the best book of all time.

Perhaps the most common book reader type, the fad reader reads what other people are reading because other people are reading it. There are a lot of these folks out there, in mob numbers. Often identifiable by their Gryffindor crop tops and Mockingjay pins, these readers are enthusiastically effusive about the well-known texts they pick up, even though the books themselves are less than…literary. Yes, let’s get this out in the open: certain books, which shall henceforth get named and shamed — Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, anything by James Patterson or Sandra Brown, you get the point — succeed through popular magnetism, and become “great books” simply through the sheer number of people reading them. This bandwagon effect happens across mediums, from championship sports teams, to blockbuster movies, but it’s a particularly problematic phenomenon in the literary realm because of the “opportunity cost” of purchasing and sharing a bestseller instead of a truly literary text.

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2. THE COLLEGE READER

I read so much in college, I’m just giving my brain a break.

The best reading and critical thinking is taking place right now at higher learning institutions around the world. This very second, thousands of students delirious from late nights at the local pub are scrunched in hard chairs, scouring textbooks, reading Romeo and Juliet for the eleventh time (and somehow still discovering new things about that dynamic text), and trying to decipher their professors’ instructions. Whether you like it or not, going to college forces you to read — if you ever want to graduate — regardless of your major.

And then — caps thrown, diplomas hung, fall begun again but this time far from any campus — you suddenly don’t read. After graduation, the college book reader types disconnect themselves from literature. When there’s no homework, it’s surprisingly easy to not pick up a book with the excuse that you’ve already paid your mental dues over 4 long years (let’s hope it didn’t take much longer). Most college book readers suffer a literary boomerang effect: they imbibe so much text during their schooling that they end up taking a permanent sabbatical from reading once they pop out into the un-academic world. A rare few recover, lured back into the literary dimension by a really good book they picked up, but most of y’all just don’t read anymore — in some small corner of yourselves, recognizing this loss, but more often, believing yourselves fulfilled by your careers.

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3. THE DIGITAL READER

Did you read that brilliant Tweet? OMG I love how he writes.

Most of us have morphed into digital readers to some extent, since well-nigh all of us have cellphones, and right now you’re staring at this literary blog housed in cyberspace. But for the holistically digital reader, online content constitutes their entire reading diet. This includes Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Instagram captions, internet news articles and their comments sections, Pinterest recipes, Netflix synopses, Youtube lyrics, and on and on. Occasionally the digital reader type may download an e-book for the downtime while waiting for their Uber, but why read that when there’s so much other great content online!? Living content, breathing content, content-y content that breeds more content! The biggest problem with the digital book reader type is that they’re never able to really sit down and read something poignant, because the hum of the internet’s divertissements perpetually intrudes upon their reading experience. In fact, you should print out the rest of this blog post, take it to a bench that’s privy to a bit of breeze and sunshine in a local park, and consider the difference in your reading experience offline.

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4. THE NEUROTIC BOOK READER

Don’t touch that.

If you always only read a book’s “Introduction” at the end, or you must finish a novel once you start it, or you would not under any condition underline your copy of Infinite Jest, or you have to read every single end-note and “Acknowledgement,” you’re probably a neurotic reader. This type of reader has very specific rules for the act of reading and the maintenance of their personal book collection. From no dog-ears, to highlighting only in green, to organizing their shelves according to author’s birthplace, to refusing to lend books lest the borrower lick their thumb lasciviously when turning pages, the neurotic book reader is preposterous to others, but perfectly rational to themselves (I’m one of them). After all, each of our criterion has both rhyme & reason — if I’m already seven pages into a book, I can’t undo that lost time, so I might as well continue through the final line. (Okay, so our criteria has slant-rhyme, but not much reason). However, despite our quirks, neurotic book readers tend to be hardcore proponents of physical books and engaged reading experiences — and in an age of binary code letters and fragmented perusals of the written word, that’s a win in my book.

5. THE UNDISCERNING READER

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If I sees it, I reads it.

Perhaps a prettier cousin of #1 on this common book reader types list, the undiscerning reader sees all reading as good reading, and thinks that both Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse AND J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone are the best books in the whole world — and wait Rupi Kaur’s Milk & Honey is just plain wonderful too — in fact it’s as good as Jane Hirshfield’s Come, Thief. Undiscerning book readers interact with texts harum-scarum. While it’s wonderful that they enjoy the act of reading, and that they’re willing to pick up titles that are often shunned because they test the intellect, you have to wonder if they’re actually reading anything at all, or just turning pages. There are definitely calibers of writing, and an inability to distinguish good books from below-average books, suggests that the undiscerning reader is missing out on the best part of the textual experience: the epiphanies and emotional variations induced by recognition of linguistic nuances.

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6. THE NON-READER

I’m in-between books.

Some people just don’t like reading. Actually, let me rephrase that: most people hate reading. It’s quite disheartening, because if you’ve had the privilege of an education in literacy and you’re able to read, there’s really no excuse for you to not be occasionally picking up a book. It comes down to simple laziness: reading requires active thinking, and people don’t like to use their brains. That’s unfortunate, since no matter the arena you work in, whether you’re a photographer or an athlete, regular reading can add dimensionality to your day-to-day existence. It’s as simple as finding a book that susurrates to you — something the Notes of Oak literary blog intends to help you do.

There’s also another type of non-reader: the person who says they love reading, and who has lots of books, but who reads zilch. These folks are everywhere, (and their presence could lead us into thinking #1 on this list is more attractive, but we’re smart enough to realize that relative allure is an illusion created by contrast) reaping the intellectual countenance afforded by readership, without actually taking the time to interact with texts. This is when the real book reader types need to whip out their literary analysis skills and grill the poseur on the purpose of the extensive footnotes in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, for example. This makes it difficult to have friends, but it’s worth it. I think.

7. THE UNCONDITIONALLY SNOBBY READER

It was okay, but I really think it could have been better.

I will be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a literary snob, but it’s with well-founded reason: I’ve long witnessed excellent texts sit unread on bookstore and library shelves, or fail to even get published at all, while twaddle gets eaten up and gushed about like it’s the most luminous writing. As such, my goal with this blog is to get all book reader types to recognize and enjoy exquisite writing — which is out there in abundance, but which just isn’t engaged with nearly as much as it should be.

In contrast, the unconditionally snobby reader believes that every piece of writing suffers from some ailment or other that they can’t quite identify, but which needs correction in order for the book to be classified as “good.” Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is “too poetic” for this type of reader, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is too fragmented, and so on. Their critiques always derive from a lack of insight on their part extrapolated onto the text’s composition; the book becomes a vehicle to prove their preferences are sovereign. The irony is that when it comes to genuinely bad books, the unconditionally snobby reader often fails to pinpoint the elements contributing to the real textual malady.

8. THE PROSE READER

People don’t read enough literature, and it’s a real shame. But I love reading — anything and everything except poetry.

The poor state of poetry as a market suggests that many people fall under this category of book readers: exclusively fiction lovers. It’s hard enough to get people to read anything at all, but there’s something about poetry that’s off-putting to the general public readership. Once again, people like the idea of poetry — a succinct piece of writing that evokes an emotional response — but when it comes to actually engaging with anything beyond the results returned for “best short poems about life,” they don’t. Good poetry is inescapably vivid, tendering tuber sentences minced into aromatic nuggets that conjure up the cosmos, that invoke the amoebic, that draw the eye to the glint of the web in the window. A good poem is a linguistic “ship in a bottle,” with each fiber of the rigging, and the wail of the sirens, and the water’s wet whisper wending its way into the living room — all palpable within the transparent vessel and transforming the space around it.

But folks don’t like that. Perhaps poetry makes them feel too vulnerable to the insistence of this is existence. Even a lot of poets don’t want to read poetry, except their own. So, instead, readers tend to stick to the safe terrain of prose — prose with its predictable sentences, its easy division into chapters, its investigation of daily phenomena via citations and footnotes. There is, of course, poetic prose — pieces that thaw the line between the lyric and the prosaic. But you don’t have to worry about running into that if you’re the reader type who’s a staunch prose fan: you have to seek it out, and most prose readers are perfectly content to let expressive, rhythmic literary work pass them by.

9. THE WRITER READER

The author used too much imagery — I would have written the scene like this… 

Writers are also inherently editors, and every piece of text is susceptible to their critique. Often, a writer’s commentary can illuminate a text’s weaknesses, because they can see through the content to the compositional process. Just as often, writers disagree with a text simply because it isn’t written exactly like they’d write it — but their version is not an improvement. Writers can be some of the best readers — only when we tuck our egos back into our pockets and consider the text from an objective standpoint, and not from vantage of our own little desk with our Venn Diagram of coffee stains and our favorite pens and our personal rituals and our ideal methods and our individual idiosyncrasies.

10. THE LITERARY READER

Virginia Woolf is my favorite author.

Welcome. The Notes of Oak literary blog is right where you need to be. As a literary reader, you know that a book’s popularity can expose something about society’s consciousness, but it isn’t an indicator that the book is literature. You also know that college helps us discover what we like to read, but that we each bear the onus to continue the search for great writing after we’ve tossed our caps. As a literary reader, you understand that reading online content, such as this blog, is problematic if it replaces the hours you would spend sitting with a tangible book. You are possibly neurotic — nothing wrong with that — but you don’t allow your quirks to obscure the point of reading: for intellectual development and a poeticized identity. You are selective in your reading taste, because you know there’s already not enough time to engage with every piece of fine literature available, and you don’t want to waste a single minute on a bad book. You have many books, and even if you haven’t read them all, it’s because you’re working on another book you checked out from the library or one your non-neurotic friend lent you — whatever the case, you are always reading something. Although you can be critical of writing, you reserve this for books that deserve it, and praise books that with the 8 Key Literary Elements Every Written Masterpiece Has. As a literary book reader type, you also read both poetry and prose, as long as the work looks intellectually promising. There’s a high probability that you’re a writer, and when you read great literature, you learn from it — you recognize the qualities that you want your own creative work to manifest. You, you are a literary reader — uncommon, and crucial to guiding all of the above reader types and others to recognize the import of perfect writing.