Pre-Reading

Mar 30, 2026

A look at how we form shared expectations about books and films before reading or watching them. Discussion of communal knowledge networks like newspapers and Twitter that pre-shape reception. Exploration of how spoilers, content warnings, and social media influence interpretation and access to banned or unread works.

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INSIGHT

Knowing Books Without Reading Them

Pre-reading is the relationship you have to a book you know about but haven't read.
Milan Terlunen describes knowing plot bits of To the Lighthouse without ever reading it, showing common partial knowledge.

ANECDOTE

Admitting Not Reading Beloved

Kim Adams confesses never having read Beloved yet knowing central plot elements and its literary importance.
She lists specific remembered details: reproduction under slavery, a woman who kills her child, and a haunting by a baby named (misremembered) Shuggs.

INSIGHT

Pre-Reading Environments Shape Shared Knowledge

Pre-reading environments are communal contexts (like newspapers or Twitter) that circulate knowledge about books before people read them.
Terlunen studied early 20th-century newspaper reviews and 2015 Twitter to map what people could know in specific times and places.

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In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is shared, social knowledge that shapes our expectations long before we open the cover or hit play.

This podcast episode forms part of the pre-reading environment for Milan’s article, "What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment" (Book History 27, no. 2 (2024): 346-374). The article proposes the Pre-Reading Environment as a new object of study for understanding how texts relate to communal knowledge. While easily overlooked by scholars, equipped with fuller knowledge derived from their own reading, Pre-Reading Environments are among the most widespread epistemic objects in book history. Turning to two literary texts, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), the article examines how their respective Pre-Reading Environments, in newspapers and on Twitter, strategically concealed key plot points that might pre-emptively spoil the experience of potential readers.

The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Milan Terlunen is a scholar of literature, with a focus on narrative and the history of reading practices. He works as a Researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. While a PhD student at Columbia University he co-created and hosted two podcasts – How To Read and In Sacred Spaces – and co-founded the Humanities Podcast Network in 2021, where he met Kim and Saronik. He is also an editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting, a huge project that he ran along with Kim, Saronik, and Beth Kramer. A book about podcasting would not be complete without its own podcast. Keep your ears peeled for Podcasting the Humanities later this year.

The image for this episode is an illustration from Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921), titled “Read Books on Practical Navigation.” It is a line drawing showing a reader swamped by piles of books. The image was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive.

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