How do you read books?

[u/NK_Grimm]

One of the best tips for writers is to read. And that's a general advice, if you wanna do X, nothing's better than seeing X being done. But I wonder, is reading for leisure enough? Or do you actually stop and try to understand what makes the author's writing work that you could implement on your own?

I most often read for leisure. Sometimes I do get struck with "oh this is cool" in terms of writing and take a mental note out of it, but I never stop reading just to scrutinize a paragraph or two.

Sometimes I also get the opposite, "I don't really like this." Not that I deem it bad writing. I'm in no place to judge other writers, but they just fall opposite to what I feel is better or my style of doing it, for what it's worth.

[u/Classic-Option4526]

I do both.

I read for leisure because I don’t want to kill my love of the written word by making it always work. Plus, you can get a petty good feel for the bigger picture things (ex: can I write a book which follows more than one pov character? Well if you’ve read for fun then you know many books do that). And, you can a repository of examples you can go back to if you do need to study something specific (I want to study fight scenes, I just read a book with really good fight scenes, lets go see how they did it.)

But, you’ll gain more by active study. I specifically set aside time to really focus on and pick apart what I like or don’t like about a specific passage. What do they focus on? What techniques do they use? How do they create tension? Etc. Occasionally when reading for pleasure I’ll bookmark a section to come back and study after I’ve finished the book.