reading in all its glory
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 is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.
Sven 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
“The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. Spend more time thinking about the inputs.”
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
For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.
Sven 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.