How Should One Read a Book?

Throughout her essay, Woolf makes use of imagery to help the reader grasp concepts that are fundamentally abstract. In the first paragraph, she conjures up quotidian scenes of a common life including “women gossiping,” “trees rustling,” and “donkey braying” (1). She goes on to compare these ordinary moments to the amalgamation of books on a shelf in a library, acquired from all different places for all different reasons. Woolf draws in her reader with these images, giving examples of commonalities they may have experienced, points of entry to her essay that they can grasp onto.

The kind of library that she portrays offers a vast choice of genre. In differentiating the many genres and how one should understand them, she states that expecting the same results from poems, novels, and biographies is like expecting the same from a tiger, a tortoise, and an elephant. This simile not only paints a picture but also emphasizes the flexibility that reading requires, as Woolf argues. These images are essential to her theme of The Critical Freedom of the Individual, since she argues that the personal approach to reading is tantamount.