From an ongoing feature of the Reanimation Library in which writers ruminate on a book from the library’s collection, this one by Corina Bardoff on The Observer’s Book of Weather:
You could of course read Weather straight through – uncreatively – for sense. It contains gems of information, like, “in very cold weather, where ice crystals are to be found in the lower part of the atmosphere, the refraction produces phenomena known as ‘mock’ suns and moons” – that is, one or two mirage suns or moons, perched on a halo around the sun/moon, like a chemistry textbook diagram of electrons orbiting a nucleus. These are also called sundogs, a term rewarded by a Google image search. You could read Weather straight through looking for bits like this, but I’m afraid that you would drastically reduce the book’s potentiality that way. Instead, why not try reading the book as if it contained encrypted messages circa WWII, so that if we happen to learn in the course of our cryptographic studies that “the limit of twilight” is about 49 miles high, won’t that be lovelier because of it? Or won’t you feel that this “limit of twilight” is suspect, and isn’t that a wonderful uncertainty that you created for yourself?
Read more here.