Column: George Saunders teaches us to pay attention in ‘A Swim in the Pond in the Rain’

One of the best parts about reading is its essential egalitarian, democratic nature.

There’s no requirement that you feel the same way as anyone else about a book or story. You don’t have to accept another’s interpretation of what a text means. It’s just you and the narrative, making meaning together, two unique intelligences joined together.

When the joining of those intelligences is truly special, when it feels like a mind meld, the experience of reading can feel a little mystical and magical. Why should mere words be able to make us laugh, experience dread, or move us to tears? How can a book make us lose track of all time as it relieves us of our own consciousness? Amazing.

We can go through our entire lives without bothering to demystify the experience, but what if in demystifying reading (and writing), we could deepen our appreciation of those moments of deep connection?

This is the work of George Saunders’s new book “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.” Drawn from a class Saunders, a Chicago native, has taught for 20 years in his day job as a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” is a lesson in looking closely at narrative to understand how and why it can weave such a spell.

Saunders chooses the Russians (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol) because their stories made an impression on him early in his attempts at writing and because their works are are deceptively straightforward, yet they reveal more with each subsequent round of study.

Saunders illustrates a way of seeing the world, a method for paying attention, and makes a case that training in this way is a morally positive act.

I wince a little at that notion, but I get where he’s coming from.

I’ve studied creative writing for nearly 25 years. And yes, I’ve loved reading since I was able to decode the words on the page, but it was in the moments when I first realized that I had the ability to understand how those words achieve their effects that I became a whole person. It’s like physicists who can tell you the forces underneath a particular phenomenon, or an engineer that understands why one bridge will stand while another will fall.

Knowing how a story worked provided a sense of agency — the belief that I could figure out and therefore control at least some aspect of the world I lived within.

Paradoxically, this upped my appreciation for the magic of fiction, particularly when I tried my own hand at it and saw how easy it is to break the spell for the reader. Because not all of us are going to study creative writing, I spent the last 15 years of my teaching career trying to bring this sense of agency to all the writing students will do, a philosophy embodied in my own book, “The Writer’s Practice.”

Reading “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” is like taking a class with the kindest, most open-minded professor you can imagine. Saunders is an engaging guide, earnest almost to a fault at times, but the enthusiasm is clearly genuine and ultimately winning. Even if you don’t agree with him, the spirit in which he’s offering his thoughts is unimpeachable.

I think our problems are much deeper than everyone learning to read like a writer, but at the same time, it wouldn’t hurt.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “I Love Myself When I Am Laughing” by Zora Neale Hurston.

2. “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean

3. “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles

4. “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk” by Kathleen Rooney

5. “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini

— Bindy B., Chicago

There is only one Bindy B., and that’s the queen of the limerick, who I featured in a column almost exactly two years ago. Using an assist from Mrs. Biblioracle, it’s a pleasure to recommend the next read for Bindy: “The Only Woman in the Room” by Marie Benedict.

1. “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson

2. “Three Hours in Paris” by Cara Black

3. “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey” by Kathleen Rooney

4. “Borges and Me” by Jay Parini

5. “Truth and Beauty” by Ann Patchett

— Susan C., Northfield

One of the books from last year that’s really sticking with me is Raven Leilani’s “Luster,” a kind of millennial coming-of-age novel that deals with issues of race, identity, art and sex in frank and powerful ways.

1. “Cleanness” by Garth Greenwell

2. “The Collected Schizophrenias” by Esmé Weijun Wang

3. “Brain on Fire” by Susannah Cahalan

4. “Hits and Misses” by Simon Rich

5. “The Invention of Sound” by Chuck Palahniuk

— Massey B., New York

For Massey, I’m recommending “Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi, a book that I hope is going to gain momentum as a lasting classic of this era.

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read to books@chicagotribune.com.