The contemporary man of letters and literary critic Harold Bloom also wrote book about the reading life. Called How to Read and Why, in it Bloom immediately discards the Adler/Van Doren model of reading as an educational enterprise; instead, Bloom describes the reading life as…
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren advanced a hypothesis that depended upon a metaphor-premise that saw the “mind” as a muscle and self-improvement as the goal. Presenting reading levels advancing from elementary through inspectional (skimming, superficial) and on to…
Books have power. Many governments fear certain books, especially those about political, social and economic philosophy; but many governments are also afraid of imaginative literature and poetry, even though some of those novels, stories and poems, may not be overtly political at all. Religions are…
Knut Hamsun once said, in response to a questionnaire, that he wrote to kill time. I think that even if he were sincere in stating it thus he was deluding himself. Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical…
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar…
How can it be that the act of reading is like making art? What would that mean? What good would it do to turn one’s life over to reading in some specifically artistic way? And how would such a decision lead to a career in…
We come into the world screaming for food and attention. The scream is our first language, a vocalization that later becomes a cry, a coo, a pleasurable burble, and when the time is right, a first primitive word. Unlike learning to read and write, which…
I’ve made a claim that there is an intimate connection between the craft of writing and the act of reading. You might question this claim on empirical grounds. Surely, there have been writers whose craft is first rate, but who haven’t read much. Maybe there…
Brady, Frank, Endgame: Bobby Fisher’s Remarkable Rise and Fall (Crown Publishing Group, New York, 328pp, $25.99) In the end he was alone, dying of a kidney disease for which he refused treatment by Reykjavik’s medical specialists, mistrusting doctors on principle and suspecting their motives. Years…
Wade Davis is the current National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. But he’s much more than that! Ethnologist, botanist, eco-traveler, master historian—and a writer whose prose glows, that’s Wade Davis. Here’s a review of his masterwork of mountaineering, the human soul, and World War I. Davis, Wade. Into…