reading in all its glory
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
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
The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley • This Year You Write Your Novel
Emily Temple • Life Advice from Jennifer Egan and All Your Other Favorite Authors
“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
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.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.