book lover: welke lezer

GL
eigenlijk is book lover een lekker wegkruipboek: een onhandige maar goedbedoelende heldin, een beetje bevooroordeeld en met een verlangen naar ouderwetse dingen zoal een moeder, een man en een kind. Ze verleis haar book lover, maar ze krijgt wel wat ze wil: een modern sprookje.Zij heeft wel een duidelijke mening over leesgroepen en deelt de lezers ook wel in: een beetje een snobje. Lees maar mee (zei ze tegen haar alter ego)
When Palmer and I first started dating we used to joke about the unspoken hierarchy of readers and the private way in which they tackle a book. At the top of the heap are the purists - people who read to soak up the elegantly constructed literary style and savor the brilliant metaphors, inventive characters, breathtaking imagery, and sparkling dialogue. The story is beside the point. I had a lit prof once who preached that one should always read the end of a novel first so the plot won't be distraction.
Not far behind are the academics - readers who never quite got over how they read a book in ther freshman English class, underlining or highlighting, turning down pages, looking up words they're not familiar with, and scribbling pithy comments in the margins.
The book worshipers come next. They keep their books covered (and not because they are romance novels), use bookmarks, and absolutely never let the book touch the floor. They look at the book as a sentient being, a living, breathing object of desire that needs to be treated with absolute respect. They read every word, even teh footnotes.
Then there are the readers who just want a good old-fashioned story and make no bones about it. They skip over long descriptive passages, skim through digressions, and zero in on who, what, and where to the nth degree.A subcategory of this is people who read books for sex, violence, or any other proclivity, and speedread passages that don't interest them.
Or how about the multitask readers, those who read while cooking, cleaning,talking on the phone, or driving. Which is stupid - not that I haven't done it.
The bottom-feeders come next and include the status readers, a group of wannabes who don't really want to read the book at all but want to be seen with it, like arm candy, the proverbial young blonde on the arm of a tycoon. They skim the book for plot and carry it around like a designer bag. Even worse are the people who listen to audio books, the new version of condensed books, or read novelizations of current movies. These people consider themselves readers, but they're not. What's most annoying is when they join in a conversation and act as though they've actually read it. I group the narcoleptic readers in this nonreader category. People who use books as Ambien and have had the same book sitting on their bedside table for the last six months. Also the bathroom readers - you know, the ones with the magazine racks near their toilets that hold old New Yorkers, Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and dog-eared collections of dirty jokes. (...)
Then there are the readers who like to hang out in bookstore cafés nursing tepid cappuccinos, hogging the table for hours while they leisurely read unpurchased books, leaving them in piles on the table for the salespeople to put away.
And let's not forget the hopeless unfinishers - people who like choosing books, buying books, starting books, but the one thing they can't seem to do is finish books.They continually deceive themselves, thinking this is the one book they are going to read all the way through, and I do think they are well-intentioned, but like diets and New Year's resolutions, the will to persevere usually fades. (...)
The most frustrating category of all includes people who read a book and just don't get it. I know, I'm a snob. I admit it. But once they tell you their analysis, there is really nothing you can do except change the subject.(72-74)