The Bliss with Books
Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…
Category: Reading
Epigraphs
One use of his commonplaces was to supply mottoes for his own and others’ periodical essays. Johnson’s adeptness in providing epigraphs suggests something about how he read and filed away crystals of literature that…
Today’s One-Liner (#290)
It is a comfort to me, that at last, in my sixty-third year, I have attained to know, even thus hastily, confusedly, and imperfectly, what my Bible contains. –Samuel Johnson, cited in Fiona MacMath, The…
Plenty of Time
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people….
Today’s One-Liner (#283)
[As a student, Howard] Thurman did this by, among other things, reading quite literally every book on the shelves of Morehouse’s admittedly modest library, most of the religious texts donated by retired white ministers. –Sohrab…
Readiness Is All
Every time I re-read a book of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, I shake my head and wonder why I had not seen that before. The answer is most likely that I was not ready…
Dictionary Bliss
Most of us prefer novels, biographies and memoirs. However, there are always those, like Malcolm X or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who see dictionaries as approachable texts and find magic in their method. –Henry Hitchings, Defining…
Today’s One-Liner (#267)
[Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language] easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in…
Have Your Pen Ready
Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, No Passion Spent Essays 1978 — 1995
Be Pro-Active
“What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what…