reading in all its glory
“The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. Spend more time thinking about the inputs.”
It is easy enough in retrospect to see a book as a screen, a shield, an escape, but at the time there was just the magic—the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements.
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley • This Year You Write Your Novel
In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people.
Sharing the books you read with others can be an intimate invitation into your brain — what you are drawn to, what you think about, and the life experiences that shaped those interests and thoughts. Even a book chosen based solemnly on aesthetics or its cultural context is still a choice that says something about its owner, or at the very least,... See more
Great books, like life, are participatory exercises in which you cannot sit passively on the sidelines.
Seth Goldenberg • Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: How to time travel, the power of reading, and being grateful when you don't have what you want
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
READING: THE TERM is as generous and imprecise as “love.” So often it means more than just the word-by-word deciphering of the printed page.