Do you like to know anything about a book before reading it? How do you read analytically/learn from what you read?

So right now, I’m reading A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (RIP) and really enjoying it but I realized I wasn’t really “getting” it until I was a decent ways into it. It was well written, supremely entertaining and funny (sometimes in a pathetic sort of way), and the characterization was phenomenal, but I only really started to discern themes of some sort after I had gotten a decent ways through the book and even then I feel like there’s more to this book thematically that I’m not fully appreciating on a first read through.

I’m going to undertake some much more literary reads this year, including the works of Vonnegut, *Don Quixote*, the works of Joyce, and others. The here are all books that I know are heavily steeped in meaning and metaphor and allegory and are driven by serious themes, but I feel like I’m not as analytical of a reader as I want to be.

How do you improve your analytical skills? How often are you able to read a book and identify the defining themes/precisely what the book is trying to “say”? Do you do any research on the book/author beforehand to figure out what the themes are before you begin? I know I could simply google “what are the themes of Don Quixote” and it’ll tell me the top 3-5 themes of the book and I won’t misguide myself, but I also know this would skew my own personal perception and what I myself take away from the text.

by BrennusRex