Poster Inspiration/Style

How to Read and Why By Harold Bloom

 

How to Read and Why

By Harold Bloom (2000)

“There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, atleast in my opintion, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness....imaginative literature is otherness and as such, aleviates loneliness.” P.19

“It matters, if individuals are to retain any ablility to form their own judgement's and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly on themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interests.” P.21

“Ultimately we read---as Bacon, Johnson and Emerson agree---in order to strenthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” P.22

“The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply. I remain sceptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.” P.22

“Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neigborhood by what or how you read. Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit: there are no eithic of reading.” P.24

“You need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, the the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others” P.24

“We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” P.25

“We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.” P.28

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others but of the way things are. Yet strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading the now much abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.” P.29

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” P.29

Classics for Pleasure By Michael Dirda

Classics for Pleasure

By Michael Dirda

2007

“Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century. More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own real feelings anf failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions.” P.1

Why Read The Classics? By Italo Calvino

Why Read The Classics?

By Italo Calvino translated by Martin Mclaughlin

(1991) Penguin Books, London.

 

“This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorizing them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young.” P.4

“Reading a classic must also surprise us, when we compare it to the image we previously had of it. That is why we can never recommend enough a first-hand reading of the text itself, avoiding as far as possible secondary bibliography, commentaries, and other interpretations.” P.5

“There is a reversal of values here which is very widespread, which means that the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography are used like a smokescreen to conceal what the text has to say and what it can only say if it is left to speak without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text itself.” P5-6

“it is no use reading the classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love.” P.6

“'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.” P.7

“After that I should really rewrite it a third time, so that people do not believe that the classics must be read because they serve some purpose. The only reason that can be adduced in their favour is that reading the classics is always better then not reading them.” P.9

"On Stories" By C.S. Lewis

P. 12

Notice here the corollary. If some fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship and danger; and after the first few hours they would be simply cold, hunger hardship and danger as you might have met on earth. And death would be simply death among those bleached craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.

P. 16

Something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure.

P.16

An literary reader can be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnet: but what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning that he has read them once, and he thinks this settles the matter....If you find that the reader of popular romances—however uneducated the read, however bad the romances—goes back to his old favorites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

P. 17

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiousity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid alseep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then it is like wasting great wine on ravenous natural thurst which merely want cold wetness.

A Text Message

After doing my survey a friend text me and wrote "Sounds fascinating! I imagine that kind of app could be quite successful - my guess (although it's only a guess) is that YA would read a lot more if their were better discovery mechanisms available."

I like that wording - better discovery mechanisms. Although it implies an app that could do what Amazon does with its "people who bought this also bought..." I think that showing off scenes and storylines and characters in trailers/illustration is definitely a discovery mechanism.

Penguin English Library

Branding for the Penguin English Library.