Engine Summer

Great post! I've never really thought about reading styles this way before. It's easy to assume that your own style is universal. I think I'm largely an auditory reader, in that a) I find it much easier to follow a book I'm listening to or reading aloud than a book I'm reading silently, and b) when I am reading silently I find it very important to have a clear sense of whose point of view a passage is from, or else what kind of narrator is telling it, so I can configure my internal-narrator-voice appropriately... but also largely a visual reader, in that I get confused and frustrated if I can't take a clear image of what's going on from the text. Akycha's simultaneous dream metaphor is very nice. I'm currently reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel, as well as rereading/re-being-read The Lord of the Rings, both of which have very clear imagery and narratorial voice, so it'll be interesting to see to what extent my current sense of my reading style is just an artifact of my current reading matter, and to what extent it's a general thing.