Status Updates From How Should One Read a Book?

ugh i LOVE HER

virginia… Virginia you have unlocked a beautiful part of my brain i believe

sheila heti your intro is beautiful

P. 10: “The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it. The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete.”

P. 8: “But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination.”

P. 7: “And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?-a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one's own creative power.”

P. 6: “Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own… He instinctively accepts Hardy's vision rather than Jane Austen's, and reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author's genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.”

P. 3: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.”

P. 2: “For though reading seems so simple - a mere matter of knowing the alphabet - it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.”

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions--there we have none.”

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’

In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind.

if we are considering how to read books for pleasure, not how to provide an adequate pension for one’s widow, this other property of theirs is even more valuable and important. But here again one should know what one is after. One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power.

To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.

Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.

To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.

"To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist - the great artist - gives you."

"We must remain readers [...] we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance." ~ V. Woolf

… facts are a very inferior form of fiction.

”but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.”

i'm reading this from the self published version of this indie bookstore i'd been to 🥺 it's literally the prettiest~!!

delish delightful decadent

F A B U L O U S

“We must pass judgement upon these multitudinous impressions; we just make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting.”

"Facts are a very inferior form of fiction"

The Sheila Heti quote: “ I never feel more valuable as a reader than when I am reading a friends draft. And it’s a special pleasure to know that my reading can change a book, not only that a book can change me”

“ if this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism.”

No estoy muy segura de incluirlo como "libro", tiene muy pocas páginas que no sean introducción y de alto mide medio palmo...Pero el contenido está muy bien