Are you well read?
The phrase is odd – how can a reader be read? Superficially, a well-read person is someone who’s read a lot. Usually, as with Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic (someone who drinks more than you do), it means someone who’s read more than you. There are many such, alas. But more of what?
There are three types of well-read readers. First is the Literary Historiographer. He or she knows who the ‘We’ are in the poem that opens ‘Hwæt. We Gardena’.
Secondly, there’s the Literary Geographer, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought’. This person can expatiate, till the reindeer come home, on Iceland’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldór.