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laconicflow t1_iybzs6i wrote

Reply to comment by Balloon_Feet in The Time Traveler's Wife and the State of Romance in 2003 by ThrowingSomeBruddahs

Me too. Doesn't sound like op did.

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ThrowingSomeBruddahs OP t1_iyc071v wrote

I literally just read the prologue before writing this. Haven’t read enough to make a judgment about whether I like the book. But even if I didn’t like it, that wouldn’t mean I had nothing to learn from it.

Edit: do people on r/books just not know what a close reading is? Sure seems like it.

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greatblackowl t1_iyd7wgo wrote

I'll admit to not knowing the term "close reading" prior to a moment ago, but from my brief research, it seems that the idea of a close reading is not to do it out of context-- that you should read a book prior to doing a close reading of the book's prologue?

It's been a few years since I've read it, but my recollection is that the time-travelling is more a representation of miscommunication and alienation from someone very constant and familiar, rather than of someone going to work. I'm not sure what that does to the close reading of the "men at sea" section but it certainly seems relevant.

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ThrowingSomeBruddahs OP t1_iyf8wb0 wrote

I think you can perform a close reading on any self-contained unit, and at least in my experience, close readings are usually performed on smaller units of text, because they pay very close attention to the specific language used in a text in order to build a larger interpretation of what the text means.

In this case, the self-contained unit I chose to examine was the prologue. However, it seems like my mentioning that this was “just from the first four pages” wasn’t a clear enough signpost that I was just reading the prologue. I’ll be more clear in the future about exactly what I’m up to.

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