State of Readers

 

To me the reading experiences can be at three levels:

1) Childhood (fascination),

2) Adulthood (questions) and

3) Maturity (realization).

When a book is enjoyable to read, the reader's experience is at the childhood stage of fascination, until this fascination passes, the readers are usually ready to accept whatever come to them. If the reading experience remains only at this level of fascination, then the readers read with joy but is stuck in the childhood of the reading experience.

If the childhood of reading can be overcome, the reading experience enters adulthood, and the readers become cautious. They start throwing challenges against the texts and the author's thinking. Their questions lead them to better reading experiences, specially while choosing books and topics. But, if the readers at this state only feels happy to ask questions and do not accept any answers or do not want to reach to understandings, their reading experience gradually gets stuck in the trap of the attention seeking questions and they gradually become joyless, soulless readers and start hunting down writers cruelly and they are very good at pushing writers to depression who need empathy and suggestions.

If those readers are ready to accept answer to their questions even it goes against their understanding and philosophy and try to revise their understandings accordingly by show empathy to opposite thinking in texts, then the readers enter the mature state of reading experience. At this level, the readers are not only fascinated or do not raise question only. They can also touch the heart of any writings. When they reach this level, it is not that the readers forget to be fascinated or asking questions; they can easily move around these three states of reading experience at the same time while reading any book.

Of course, there is another kind of readers, who are mainly eager to express their erudition. I call this, the sick state of reading experience. The goal of the reading experience of the reader at this level is to express their own erudition only. This level of reading experience, which is mainly based on hollow understanding, is affected by the sickness of erudition but is full of flashy words.