ABSTRACT
Reading for most people seems an occupation which is carried out in a mechanical and unthought-out way. A colleague, asked recently how he read a book, laughed a little in embarrassment, and then replied, “Oh, I just pick up the book, open it to a page, and begin to read the words.” In an oversimplified way this is all true, but it leaves something to be desired in a description of everything that occurs during the act of reading. Pursuing this matter a little further, two quite different kinds of reading, recently experienced, proved rather interesting in their contrasts. The first reading experience was the result of a demand placed on this writer to produce a brief essay concerning the life and writings of an Ohio author, Charles Waddell Chesnutt. The second experience came as a single book, read for sheer pleasure, provoked and prodded the reader into a whole series of brief reading adventures, all oddly held together by the book which made them necessary. The two reading experiences were so different in their nature that viewing them in retrospect they seem to represent two separate functions entirely.
