Books are always a collaboration between the author and the reader. This results in many different experiences of the same text. I've long felt that one of the key things a person does when writing, is to define the gaps where the reader will be invited to plug in their own thoughts and desires. Often it's what we don't know in a story that stays with us.

For me, one of the great pleasures of reading has always been the time I spend with a story while I'm not actually reading it. This is a major reason why I avoid binge reading (unless I'm ill) because I need the pauses in which to reflect and wonder. Reading a book slowly allows me more opportunities to do this and tends to enhance my reading experience. I engage imaginatively with the text, thinking most about the things that are implied. A text that makes everything too clear tends not to charm me in the same way as one laced through with ambiguities.

We get very attached to our own readings. It can be disturbing if the author comes back with reasons to think that their take on their story is not yours. We see this a lot in fandoms for all sorts of things. To read well (or watch, or listen) we need to recognise that our personal take on a story probably isn't universal. There's nothing invalid about a reading that doesn't match the creator's intent - people who have traditionally been left out of stories have to read themselves in deliberately or deal with not being represented. So we infer queerness, or disability, or a different ethnicity. But if we want our reading to be the only reading - even going so far as pressuring the creator to uphold our version - this becomes toxic. Curiously it isn't the people who are left out who do this, it's the straight white boys.

We don't teach people how to read, not really. We teach kids how to extract words from a page, and we might teach them how to think about the context in which a story was written. I can't help but think we'd understand ourselves better, and the relationships we might have with stories if we encountered fan fiction in formal educational spaces and were encouraged to think more deeply about how people read, what they bring of themselves to stories, and what the implications are.