How Reading Is Written – A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein by Astrid Lorange Paperback | $24.95 Trad | ISBN: 978-0-8195-7512-8 | 269 pp. | 6 x 9” | 1 illus.| December 2014 Reviewed by Edith Doove Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth edith.doove@plymouth.ac.uk How Reading is Written, which in its title alludes to the Gertrude Stein anthology How Writing is Written, is the result of Lorange’s extended PhD research. At the very the beginning she uses a quote from Tender Buttons, as a very apt introduction: “The use of this is manifold”. Alluding to the multiple meanings of manifold the book is meant to be non-linear, a flexible object, a book to work with. Lorange regards the index as instrumental for this kind of use stating that as a paratext it is auxiliary and derivative. The index can also be seen as a kind of translation in her view, presenting, as it were, a book within a book. After the introduction on the use of the index Lorange poses the question of her own preoccupation: ‘Why Stein?’ - which could just as well be ‘Why still Stein?’ as literature on her chosen subject is both vast and substantial. Her response to her own question is the necessity for a different approach that acknowledges a different quality in the writing and that comes down to a reading ‘with’, ‘alongside’, and ‘giving in to’ the endurance of what reading Gertrude Stein actually is. Stein’s writing is usually either approached as hermetic, difficult, stubborn and nonsensical or made the subject for extended searches for hidden meanings. Both approaches are however limiting the text’s meaning as they either resort to intrinsic meaning or pure nothingness. Lorange argues therefore an alternative mode in which the compositional practices of reading and writing are to be seen as constructive experiences that produce and investigate the contexts and relations of language in a specific occasion (Lorange, 10). The so-called obscurity or opaqueness, a terminology Lorange gets from Steven Meyer 1 of Stein’s writing is thus seen as a positive, a “philosophical and constructive attitude” that leads to the contemplation on what is endured in a proper engagement with a text and what happens in the time of reading as this is exactly what Stein seemed to aim at. Quoting Michael Davidson’s essay ‘On Reading Stein’, Loranges argument is therefore to support the imperative to learn “to read writing, not read meanings, (…) to interrogate the spaces around 1 Meyer, S. (2001). Irresistible dictation. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.