Salon has a nice article today on new books that will teach you how to read. As the writer points out, these books aren't really about reading. They are just attacks against each writer's particular bugbear: academics, literary theory, corporations, and the modern world.
Personally, I think you CAN learn to read, just like you can learn to watch movies and understand their history, references, and vocabulary. But you have to work at it. Most people tend to read either for emotion (they want to empathize with the characters) or for ideas (they want to know what the characters know about topic x) and its difficult to shift between the two or find a useful way to discuss the two because they are considered very different thing in our culture.
This reminds me that I also need to start blogging about Dramatica and some of my theories on what I think it can do for literary analysis.
