ISBN: 9781804471319
Paperback • 184pp • £15
138 mm x 216 mm
3 September 2025
Thema: CBW, CFP, CJCR
Territory: World English
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Relearning to Read (Renard Press Edition)
Adventures in Not-Knowing
Renard Press Edition
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Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing invites you to turn the way you read upside down and see what falls out. Drawing on an approach to reading developed over more than a decade of interactions with stories and book-lovers around the world through the author’s hit blog ayearofreadingtheworld.com, the book puts not-knowing centre stage and plays with what examining the gaps in our understanding and the assumptions we use to plug them can teach us about ourselves and our world.
Many books about books celebrate the cosiness and consolation of reading; Relearning to Read does the opposite. Built on the realisation that to read widely we must make friends with incomprehension – because no one can be an expert in all the world’s literatures – it explores how getting comfortable with discomfort and owning our limitations can take us further and deepen our appreciation of the world’s complexity and richness.
Living as we do in the golden age of surveillance marketing… it has become ever more difficult to negotiate uncertainty – in life as on the page. With this beautifully imaginative guide, Ann Morgan makes an eloquent case for reading beyond the bounds of our understanding, not just to broaden our horizons, but to better understand ourselves. I shall be taking it to my next book group! I urge you to do the same.
Maureen Freely, novelist and translator
An insightful, reflective and companionable essay collection that penetrates the cultural biases that define our reading. It looks at how our assumptions re what is normal, good or canonical shape our appreciation of eg humour, gender, politics. I came to this at the right time in my reading life. Importantly the tone is open and collaborative rather than finger wagging. Makes me realise however culturally contingent art is, but not hopelessly so. If anything this is what makes the art worth engaging with.
Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul
Ann Morgan’s quietly profound book shows us how, paradoxically, by acknowledging what we don’t know, we can engage with what we read more deeply. Relearning to Read is a guidebook to a brave new world of literary pleasures.
Keith Kahn-Harris, author of The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language
Ann Morgan is a reader’s reader, and in Relearning to Read she uses her erudition and powers of insight to hone a lively discussion on how to read books from around our increasingly fractured world – and how to live within the chaos.
Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity
Relearning to Read is a wonderfully enlightening look at how and why we read. Expansive and open-hearted, it is a genuinely original and transformative book.
Doug Johnstone, author of The Jump
Provocative, vigorous, elegant and compelling – this beautiful book dares us to stop making our minds up, and start to open them instead. It will stimulate so much curiosity, compassion and ambition in its readers. It needs to be read as widely as possible.
Daisy Buchanan, author of Read Yourself Happy
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