I consider reading itself - a state of art. It not only takes a skillful author to produce a great book, but also a skillful reader to comprehend it. “The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Here is some traits, a good reader, in my opinion, should have:
A masterful reader must know how to extract from a book everything valuable it can offer. From different kind of innovative thoughts to simply learning new words.
Reader should adapt his reading method to each book. Someone who doesn’t know how to do that, will quickly run through “Einsteins’ theory” with the same pace he is used to run through his morning news paper.
What do you think? Do you agree? If so, what else would you suggest to someone who wants to improve his reading skills?
I don’t see how anything you wrote relates to or argues for reading being an art. It is a skill that has to be developed, trained, and adapted to the situation, but why should it be considered an art and not just a skill?
It just an unnecessary and pretentious assessment to me.
I’ll repeat what I said down in the comments. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art. We could argue endlessly because each one interprets it in his own way.
For me personally art, is something you spend time and hard physical and emotional work to produce. To achieve a great state of art you should master a relevant skill. Reading meets all of this criteria and that’s why I consider it as an art.
reading a book doesn’t meet this criteria. it does not “produce something”
You absolutely DO produce something. Just not in a regular physical sense. If reading books had no output you wouldn’t read any. The ‘production’ of the books is the gain we receive from reading them, be that a historical knowledge or an emotional happiness.