If on a Winter’s night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Forgive me for having an impressionable mind, I can’t help but love every single media I consume, and I say this the loudest when I read this novel. From the beginning to the end, I was obsessed – it was unique, it was new, I had never read a book about books ever! But then again, I hadn’t read that many books before taking this course. Nonetheless, I think it could be said that this book has been the most entertaining and interesting one from all the other novels I’ve read, yet I wonder if the opinion will change the more novels I read.

I found myself relating somehow to Ludmilla, about how I usually stay reading books as a reader, without crossing the boundaries between the author and the reader, and only absorbing the stories as themselves, but I suppose the difference lies in how she prefers to do it that way and I having never tried otherwise. Meaning, I have never thought about what goes beyond the book, or should I say before, about the process of the writer writing it from scratch, to being produced, et cetera.. So this novel really made me think about books from a whole other perspective, about books as their own world! It also does this by involving us, the readers into the narration, with its meta-narrative state and second person perspectives. I could almost imagine myself as the character, inside the novel, in a journey to finish his books that ended with a cliffhanger. I couldn’t really delve into the narration as I couldn’t relate to the Reader himself, as I am a woman, and I couldn’t help but notice how clear it was that the novel was written by a man. As the critic in the lecture says, it assumes that the Reader, the norm is masculine and in that I couldn’t bring myself to fully immerse into the novel as a character in it. In addition, the small stories as the unfinished books always were from the perspective of men and the objectification of women in them were recurrent. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the novel and its postmodern, or metamodern? narrative. It sort of reminded me of the tv show Fleabag, in which the main character talks to the audience as we were in on her mind, involved with the story and her thoughts.

Anyways, I really enjoyed the 10 books, and stupidly enough, every time, I kept forgetting that it was going to end abruptly and was disappointed whenever I turned the page and it was either blank or onto the next chapter. This almost deepened my relatability to the Reader, or myself in the novel as I understood the need for continuation and endings of the novels the Reader had. It makes me wonder about books in general, about how as readers we expect every page to be a new addition to the story, a new layer to the meaning it had been trying to entail.

“Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.”

The main story, on the other hand, was very interesting as it was like a detective mystery book, but in the world of publishing and literature. Every aspect of the novel was new and refreshing to me, so I hope to read more works like this in the future!!

My question is: (or /s are)

What are you like as a reader? Do you peek into the ending of the book to give yourself a small view of the novel itself? Do you judge books by their covers? Do you read about the author to know more about what the author was trying to give, or do you prefer to read it as it is, no expectations nor prior knowledge?