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”,…
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…