Pause every once in a while, remove your glasses, think about that last great sentence you read, sigh, sip your tea and then get back to it.
—
Advice on reading from a librarian, 1937. Also see how to read like a writer. (via explore-blog)
Good advice. Also this, which I found when I followed the “how to read like a writer” link:
“The only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading ‘texts’ in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written.
I left graduate school and became a writer.”
—Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
I don’t want to badmouth the really decent people I studied with and under when I did a brief stint in a master’s program in English lit, but I can say that reading the way they asked me to confused and depressed me, and I was scared that if I continued with it it would damage my enjoyment of reading, or my ability to write. So I dropped out. I enjoyed the reading I did for pleasure in the few months after I left grad school more than I did when I was eight years old, which was an awful lot.
(via toomuchlifeinyoumydear)
