Recollecting context

From A question about deep reading by Tyler Cowen. Cowen describes his preferred method of reading:

1. Read a classic work straight through, noting key problems and ambiguities, but not letting them hold you back. Plow through as needed, and make finishing a priority.

1b. Mark up the book with bars and questions marks, but don’t bother writing out your still-crummy thoughts. That will slow you down.

2. After finishing the classic, read a good deal of the secondary literature, keeping in mind that you now are looking for answers to some particular questions. That will structure and improve your investigation. But do not read the secondary literature first. You won’t know what questions will be guiding you, plus it may spoil or bias your impressions of the classic, which is likely richer and deeper than the commentaries on it.

3. Go back and reread said classic, taking as much time as you may need. If you don’t finish this part of the program, at least you have read the book once and grappled with some of its problems, and taken in some of its commentators. If you can get through the reread, you’ll then have achieved something.

4. I am an advocate of the “close in time” reread, not the “several years later” reread. The several years later reread works best when it has been preceded by a close in time reread, otherwise you tend to forget lots, or never to have learned it to begin with, and the later reread may be more akin to starting a new book altogether.

5. If you want to find new things in books you already know and love, opt for new editions, new translations, and new typesettings where you will encounter it as a very different visual and conceptual field.

I have a hard time bringing myself to mark a book, but I do, more often than I used to, dog ear pages with passages, sentences, or arguments that warrant rereading.

I also do a sixth item - consider the book, whether fiction or non-fiction, in its historical context. What are the tells in the text that illuminate a time now past?

For example, I recently watched a dramatization of one of the G.K. Chesterton Father Brown stories. I like Chesterton and I enjoy Father Brown, though not as much as some of Chesterton's other writings. The Father Brown series is set in the interwar period between 1918-1939. A time period covered by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in The Long Weekend.

The drama hinged on a spirit cult. The contextual consideration is just how strong was the paranormal passion in that time frame. No social weekend was complete without a seance. Everyone had lost someone in the Great War and there was a desperate longing across wide swaths of society to find a way to reconnect with those who would never return.

It is a sobering consideration of the depths of those losses. It keeps our contemporary concerns in perspective. None of that was the point of Chesterton's story but it is something that can be brought to mind by conscious effort to recollect context.