Reading is a very complex process as the following examples try to show.

Every book is a genre all its own. It is a combination or play on some combination of other types of books, and so lives up to what is taken to be Polonius’s over the top statement in Act II, Scene ii of Hamlet about the players:

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,

comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,

historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-

comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or

poem unlimited:

As usual, Polonius knows what he is talking about. Nobody composes afresh; everyone adapts the genres that are there. The writers of the Gospels were fresh in that they reworked the tale of a man going to meet his fate, as that might happen in a Greek tragedy, to Oedipus for example, into an exemplary and unique story, endlessly to be repeated, of a god-inspired personage working out the inevitabilities of his nature and his destiny in the course of his short and doomed ministry. And, at the more comic end of the spectrum, It is reported that Lucille Ball got wind of meetings where producers would ask for a Lucille Ball like comedy with someone else. Ball got the message and moved to television and became “Lucy”.

But that is not the whole of it. Every paragraph of a book is also a distinct entity. It has a structure and a tone different from that of the paragraphs which preceded it and which follow it. Part of the pleasure of reading is the interaction between the reader’s imagination, memory and analysis and what is there to be discovered in every paragraph. So while most literary remarks about a recent book, John A. Farrell’s “Richard Nixon: The Life”, might tell a reader that they can garner pleasure from a set piece such as Farrell’s clear retelling of the Alger Hiss investigation, or from Farrell’s not that well done overall presentation of Nixon as America’s very own Richard III, though I would let him off easy on that because he is competing with Shakespeare, let us attend, instead, to how just a few of Farrell’s paragraphs provide their pleasures.