A Reader’s Manifesto - Open The Magazine

Any manifesto worth reading demands the impossible.

The asymmetry of reading only remains juicy if we treat books like the cheap options they are. That means bailing out at the earliest possible opportunity, skimming with abandon, being promiscuous in our appetites, and abandoning the idea that it's virtuous to slog through some interminable volume for the sake of completion.

Radical Hermeneutics was also something of a manifesto for a philosophy that mattered. The introduction was titled “Restoring Life to Its Original Difficulty”; the final chapter, “Openness to Mystery.” This was a postmodernism with philosophical chops and a religious heartbeat.