Many people go to book stores, join book clubs, and claim to still read those things. Reading, like cooking or sex, is an activity with degrees of effort and reward. The ability to read is a technical one, but even the most educated readers can move through texts without much food going into their mouths.
Have you read any good books lately? This question seems weighty perhaps because a book must be so so full of the world of its author, that one must wonder who to fill their head-bucket with. Personally, I’ve long opted to choose a book the way an animal eats. That is, I choose a book exactly for its cover, how a skim on page eight feels, and how I may have come upon it. Then, I start reading with a total disregard for who the author is.
At this point, I am at the complete...
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Many people go to book stores, join book clubs, and claim to still read those things. Reading, like cooking or sex, is an activity with degrees of effort and reward. The ability to read is a technical one, but even the most educated readers can move through texts without much food going into their mouths.
Have you read any good books lately? This question seems weighty perhaps because a book must be so so full of the world of its author, that one must wonder who to fill their head-bucket with. Personally, I’ve long opted to choose a book the way an animal eats. That is, I choose a book exactly for its cover, how a skim on page eight feels, and how I may have come upon it. Then, I start reading with a total disregard for who the author is.
At this point, I am at the complete mercy of the author’s insidious worldview. I know nothing of their background or Wikipedia summary. The more confused I am at the outset, the better I will understand from the horse’s mouth. Because a more demanding encounter with text begins when comprehension falters. Difficulty signals that you’ve reached the fringe of what Italo Calvino referred to as “the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.”