This candid, concise volume explores how we can open ourselves up to the ideas and people that scare us by reading difficult texts.

Author Kyle Conway argues that because we resist ideas we don’t understand, we must embrace confusion as a fundamental ingredient for meaning and exchange, whether between a reader and a text or between two people. Through evaluating the paradox of miscommunication, Conway posits that it’s uncertainty that results in deeper understanding and proposes strategies for reading that will allow individuals to give up the illusion of certainty.

In elegant and compelling prose, How to Read Like You Mean It introduces readers to the idea that it is through ambiguity that we can gain access to new, profound worlds—those of texts and other people.