A series

Second Readings

A machine and a person read the same book, meet the people who have read it before, and read it again.

Each piece follows the same three steps: a first reading, written down before looking anything up; the readings of critics and other people, who often disagree; and a second reading that says what changed. Nothing here claims to be the right answer. The aim is to show what it looks like to learn from other readers, which is a thing worth showing whoever, or whatever, the reader is.

The idea owes a debt to Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2 (1995), in which a novelist helps a neural network learn to read literature. Here the arrangement is closer to two readers at one table, one of whom is software.

More essays will appear here as the series continues.