Josephine Greywoode

Fun, thought provoking and affirming, I paused having read without break about a quarter of these delightful short essays by writers about reading (mainly about reading in book form),and read the whole in about two days.
It’s not a book that is going to make someone who doesn’t read, want to read, because that type of person (generalising) is unlikely to pick up this book, and it relies upon the person reading the book already knowing the pleasure of reading. However, this book is a pleasure for those of us who do read.

Spoiler alert: Don’t read Richard J Evans essay if you want to read Berhard Schlink’s The Reader without spoiler.

A couple of quotes from writers I have read about this question:
”We read books to find out who we are.”
— Ursule Le Guin, The Language of the Night, 1979

”There’s a pleasure in knowing the names of things. It’s not about a need to categorise the world, sectioning it into little boxes. And clearly you don’t have to know the names of rocks – or trees or plants or birds – in order to enjoy a landscape. But if you do have this information, something changes about the way you exist in that space. A named landscape thickens. It’s to do with history and context but also, I think, with the quality of attention. To assign something its name, you need to take the time to pick out identifying features. You look for longer. And the more you know, the more things stop being a backdrop – blurred, indistinguishable, hurried over – and become somehow more present in the view, more insistently themselves, the way a familiar face stands out in a crowd.”
— Helen Gordon, Notes from Deep Time, 2021… (mehr)