Reading as an Addiction - quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing source of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as an opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spend many delightful hours over both these works.... Of course to read in this way is reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of eternity, is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot live without. Who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? And the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? And so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. 

(W. Somerset Maugham, from his Collected Short Stories, Volume 4; quoted on the Literary Life facebook page by Wendi Lord Capehart)

[photo courtesy of Annie Spratt at Unsplash]

Blessings,

A Well-Read Christian - Quote from Dennis Kinlaw

One day when my son was home during his medical training, we had a conversation about his work. I said to him, "In medicine you have found what you want to do. You are going to give your life to it, and you will love it. But you must be careful. The first thing you know, you will wake up and be fifty years old, and the only thing you will have between your ears will be human anatomy and how to cut into it. That is a pretty thin ration on which to live intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. You need to start forcing yourself every day to read something that is not medical so that when you are fifty, you will be a human person as well as a surgeon. 

(from Feb 13, This Day with the Master devotional book, Zondervan)


Blessings,

How Scout Learned to Read (from To Kill A Mockingbird)

To Kill a Mockingbird is in the top ten of my favorite novels. I especially enjoyed this quote on reading that comes early in the book. On Scout's first day in school the teacher asks her to read. Scout has been reading anything and everything as long as she can remember.

When she discovered I was literate, she looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

"Teach me?" I said in surprise. "He hasn't taught me anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything," I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. "Why he's so tired at night he just sits in the living room and reads."

"If he didn't teach you, who did?"  Miss Caroline asked good naturedly. "Somebody did. You weren't born reading The Mobile Register. . . Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage."

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired, meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church - was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me. . . I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. (p. 17-18)

Blessings,

E-Books vs Physical Books - Part Three

Tim Challies once again linked to a great post from The New Yorker about how our brains process printed words and the big difference between e-books and regular books. I continue to be fascinated by this discussion.

One slice of the article:

Professor Ann Mangen had her students read a short story in two formats: a pocket paperback or a Kindle e-book. When Mangen tested the readers' comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot. When readers were asked to place a series of events from the story in chronological order - a simple plot-reconstruction task, not requiring deep analysis or critical thinking -  those who had read the story in print fared significantly better, making fewer mistakes and recreating an over-all more accurate version of the story. The words looked identical, but their physical materiality mattered for basic comprehension.

MaryanneWolf's (author of a book on the history of reading called Proust and the Squid) concerns go far beyond simple comprehension. She fears that as we turn to digital formats, we may see a negative effect on the process that she calls deep reading..."Reading is a bridge to thought," she says. "And it's that process that I think is the real endangered aspect of reading."

Two previous posts on this topic are here and here.

Quote on True Reading by C.S. Lewis

On August 7, 1921, C. S. Lewis wrote to his brother about staying in the King Arthur Hotel in Cornwall. With nothing else to do there, he roamed into the lounge, where had found quite a few uniformly bound books including a Persian epic poem and Aristotle’s Ethics. This uniformity of binding perplexed Lewis until he realized that the books were part of a series of "The Hundred Best Books". Lewis went on: How I abominate such culture for the many, such tastes, ready-made, such standardization of the brain. To substitute for the infinite wanderings of the true reader through the bye-ways of the country he discovers... (from Letters of C. S. Lewis, quoted by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, p. 242)

As I've commented before, I used to be a slave to lists of "classics to read before you die." Now I've come to peace with my general love for the classics (which allows disdain for a handful of them) and my eclectic interest in other types of books. Hallelujah for the "infinite wanderings of a true reader!"