Do we all read a different book?

There's an expression that some readers like to use -- I just saw it earlier today -- and I've always found it a curious one: "We all read a different book."

I know what people are trying to say when they use that phrase, but it still grates every time I see it. One of the things that I think is most enjoyable about reading is that, to the contrary, we all read the same book. Thus it's a shared experience that provides a common point of interest and reference for fellow readers.

Books are immutable -- one of their most remarkable features, I think. While everything around us changes, the words on the page stay the same. When we pick up a copy of Huckleberry Finn, the story is the same as Twain wrote it over 120 years ago. And that's a wonderful connection to the past that is almost impossible to get otherwise. (How else can we have a direct experience of late-19th century American life and thought?)

Of course, we as readers are all different, and we bring our own thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, expectations, emotions, biases and everything else to a book -- so the way in which we experience it is different. But it is we that are different; not the book.

No matter how times change, and technology advances, and trends come in and out of fashion, the book remains the same. And thank God for that.

Comments

[I.J.Parker]

Yes, of course. Even the author sees his own book through different eyes at a later time.
What is a trickier question is whose estimate of the book's quality among all those readers is more convincing and why. But then, that's what we have reviewers for, right? :)

[DMC]

It is a shared experience, but it's filtered through our perceptions and emotions.

How else could two people read the same book, and one thinks it's wonderful, while the other one hates it.

I participate in an online community dedicated to Warren Murphy and Dick Sapir's The Destroyer series. From the discussions we've had, as much as we might agree on the characters -- their appearances, their personalities -- there is still differences of opinion, subtle shades of interpretation of their emotions and motives.

We have disagreements on what makes a good Destroyer plot, who should play Remo/Chiun/Smith in the movie, and which fantastic elements are too fantastic. Some don't like when gods show up; some didn't care for the time travel plot.

To use your example of Huckleberry Finn, you call it "a wonderful connection to the past," but others have called it racist and had it banned.

[David J. Montgomery]

But my point was that the book remains the same, even as we change. That's one of the wonderful things about them -- they are moments captured in time and while we may change, they do not.

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