“Fresh Air” host Terry Gross is one of the great public readers of my lifetime.
I’m not talking about her reading voice (though she obviously has a great reading voice), but how she reads, and then shares the byproduct of that reading with her audience.
When she interviews an author, as she does with great frequency, the acuity of her insights and attention is sometimes apparent by the pause you can hear before an author responds. Writing on the Bluesky platform, writer and poet Saeed Jones remarked on how Gross noticing a scene from his memoir “How We Fight for Our Lives” was referenced as a single line in a previous book left him “shook” because “no one had ever clocked that detail before.”
Thanks to a viral video posted to social media by “Fresh Air” and NPR, we are now privileged to have an inside look at the specific method of Terry Gross’ reading, and I’m here to tell you it’s not for the faint of heart, and is indeed something of a horror show.
But it’s also incredible.
The one-minute forty-five-second video titled “How to Read Like Terry Gross” opens with a confession from Gross: “By reading a book, I’ve rendered it totally unreadable for anybody else because the book is totally broken. It’s a mess.”
What follows is the evidence, a shot panning across a shelf of books, leaf-side out, showing dozens, maybe even hundreds of dog-eared pages per book, making each volume double its original size.
Those dog ears aren’t dainty little creases at the top, but big, honking folds that you could not miss. In her system, the dog ears denote a page where Gross has circled something of interest, and judging from the number, there’s lots of things she’s interested in.
A dog ear in the lower corner of the page has special meaning, containing something Gross might want to specifically mention in the intro or a sentence she wants to quote.
But wait, there’s more! In the white space among the front matter of the book, she takes all manner of notes on the connections and themes she sees in the text, a method for processing her own reaction and providing fodder for the shape of the interview she plans to conduct.
I’ve written previously about how I am, for the most part, quite gentle with my books. I was conditioned as a child to read in a fashion that would allow the books to be resold in my mom’s store, The Book Bin in Northbrook, so every one of those dog ears makes me reflexively wince.
At the same time, Gross’ method is hugely inspiring. She talks about how if she’s going to interview an author, she, not a producer, is going to read the book.And it shows. I’ve lost count of the number of times a “Fresh Air” interview has led me to pick up a book or has enhanced my understanding of a book I’ve already read. A book is a conversation between author and reader, so it shouldn’t be surprising that someone who has had conversations professionally for decades should be such an astute reader of books.
Other readers may not be able to read a post-Terry Gross-read copy, but it strikes me that she’s building an incredible archive of texts with her dog ears, annotations and notes. I hope she’s considering a donation of these artifacts to some place that could make them accessible to others, so we can have an even deeper appreciation of what it means to read like Terry Gross.
John Warner is the author of books including “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.” You can find him at biblioracle.com.
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Name of the Band is R.E.M.” by Peter Ames Carlin
2. “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Tom O’Neil with Dan Piepenbring
3. “Karla’s Choice” by Nick Harkaway
4. “The Waiting” by Michael Connelly
5. “Walking with Sam” by Andrew McCarthy
— Steve H., Nashville, Tennessee
I’m going to go with some suspenseful fiction, reaching back to a new series from earlier this year, “The Mailman” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins.
1. “The Greatest: My Own Story” by Muhammad Ali with Richard Durham
2. “Ali: A Life” by Jonathan Eig
3. “The Color of Lightning” by Paulette Jiles
4. “Things in Nature Merely Grow” by Yiyun Li
5. “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff
— Michael S., Bolingbrook
For Michael, I’m going for an introspective memoir with a larger story about the world we live in, “Ancestor Trouble” by Maud Newton.
1. “The Jackal’s Mistress” by Chris Bohjalian
2. “The Queens of Crime” by Marie Benedict
3. “The Poppy Fields” by Nikki Erlick
4. “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey
5. “The Bookbinder” by Pip Williams
— Ann H., Clarendon Hills
I want something with sentiment that doesn’t lapse into unearned sentimentality, “Morningside Heights” by Joshua Henkin.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.
