Category: books and reading

(he) did not camp near the soporific letter nor contort himself with a foul translation characteristic of rustics, but by right of victory carried the meaning as if captive into his own language.       St. Jerome on translations by Hilary the Confessor

I remember clearly how we read back then.  The whole ecstasy of that youthful reading, it wasn’t reading, but galloping, racing through books.  We sought out the racehorse of action, direct speech, short, muscular expressions.  We hated the ritardandos, the descriptions of nature, who needed them…               Now I feel the need to stop, like an old man winded by climbing up a slope he used to take in three bounds.  The hidden pleasures of slowness.  I love to linger long over some “It was a pleasant May morning, the birds were shouting with song, the dew glowed beneath the sun’s soft rays…”

from The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov    translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

the act of reading makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience       Henry James

…three aspects of the experience of reading fiction: language, the world, and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves.  

We don’t read ‘in order’ to benefit in this way (experience more reality) from fiction.  We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on – because it is alive and we are alive.       James Wood

Paradoxically, at the same time as being able to be more self-indulgent by escaping into a world where no one can reasonably expect us to do anything, we have the luxury of putting ourselves and our needs, wants, and fears aside for a while; by being more selfish in a book, we become less self-ish.         Ann Morgan

(from Zama, the Governor questions a clerk in his office.)

What are you writing?…A book?  Make sons, Manuel, not books… then the clerk, in a respectful tone, deeply convinced of his own words, said “I want to realize myself in myself.  I don’t know what my children will be like.”  The governor hesitated…”Books? Ha, Ha!  Worse than children.” …(Manuel) managed to say, “Children realize themselves, but whether for good or ill we do not know.  Books are made only for truth and beauty.”  “That’s what you believe, what authors believe, but readers don’t see it like that,” came the ready retort.       Antonio di Benedetto

…like no other human creation, books have been the bane of dictatorships…the history of reading is lit by a seemingly endless line of censors’ bonfires.       Alberto Manguel

One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.                                            Joseph Conrad