Category: Reading

Today’s One-Liner (#160)

I read something from Boswells’ Life of Johnson almost every day. –James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs:  Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing 

Today’s One-Liner (#141)

Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader” Susan Sontag, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Freeing up the Imagination

Not too long ago, I heard a tape of the memorial service held at Stanford University Chapel at the death of Eric Voegelin. On the tape, Professor William Havard, I think, remarked that Voegelin read…

Today’s One-Liner (#126)

Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history…

Today’s One-Liner (#121)

 He that has read Shakespeare with attention will perhaps find little new in the crowded world.  –Dr. Samuel Johnson, dedication in Mrs. Lennox’ Shakespeare Illustrated, 1753, cited in  A Johnson Sampler, edited by Henry Darcy…

Today’s One-Liner (#112)

“He knows how to read better than any one; he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.” –Mrs. Knowles, on Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life…

Dear Annie and Lindsay

I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…

Genres

[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping.  A card index of all imaginable inhumanities.  Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…