starlight’s Reviews > How Should One Read a Book? > Status Update

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. 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.”