Status Updates From How Should One Read a Book?

Do not dictate to your author; try to
become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If
you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are
preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.

It is simple enough to say that since books have
classes – fiction, biography, poetry – we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each
should give us. Yet few people ask from books what
books can give us. Most commonly we come to books
with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that
it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering,

‘the shape of the book ends up being some alchemy between the shape the writer created and the shape of our own life as we read it’