The reading life seems to encompass two (seemingly) contradictory states of mind. There is the mindfulness required of any serious reader, a focus that demands quiet, solitude and attention, a “shutting-out” of distracting sensory impressions. You read in a sunny room. You’re distanced from noise…
In Prague, Kafka informs a friend that books ought to wound the soul—that a book should cause us grief equal to the death of someone we love more than we love ourselves. In Key West, Hemingway is writing the opening of his masterpiece, “A Farewell…
Kafka’s belief that a book should affect us like a disaster or a blow to the head, that a book should take an ax to the frozen sea inside us, contrasts not only with the nineteenth century world of “great” or “heroic” literature as…
And then Franz Kafka throws a bomb into a library full of happy readers. Kafka not only wants us to read books that wound and stab us, but also is sure that without books we’d be happier. Talk to anybody not in the reading life…
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as…
We are culturally burdened by the notion of the reading life as a happy life, one of steady progress, discovery, pleasure; a garden of intellectual and emotional maturity in which we harvest the fruit of our pursuits in literature, poetry, and music, with books a…
So far a kind of psycho-metaphysical thread has weaved its way through the reading life as interpreted by writers like Sven Birkerts, Wendy Lesser and Jill McCorkle. Birkerts mentions the word soul a number of times in essays, arguing that slow, careful reading of challenging…
Gary Gilmore was an abused child who grew up to be a killer. Gilmore was consumed by a torrent of rage which he transferred to the people he knew and to strangers during his crime spree. Ultimately, he was caught, tried and convicted of murdering…
Only through art do we come to appreciate his emotional state as we engage in an act of imagination that makes the poet’s experience our own. The social function of this within society is that it forges links between us. Stephen Dobyns on William…
There is no means by which a reader can embark upon a sure-fire program that will result in a magical reading life, a reading project guaranteed to improve the mind and character. Surely, then, reading fiction and poetry is, as Bloom argues, a “solitary praxis”,…