Advice on Reading Books

During this upcoming festive season we will all be getting into lots of reading – good, and perhaps not so good books. So, I have just compiled a series of quotes / comments from my favorite author (*) on how to fully enjoy the reading experience - - - and hope it may be helpful for you too.

1 – Do not classify / select books according to age-groups - - -
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which in not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty [seven] I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

2 – Take it easy - - - use moderation - - -
“The man who gobbles down one story [or book] after another at a sitting has no more right to complain if the result is disastrous than the man who swills liqueurs as if they were beer.”

3 – Do not despise popular literature - - -
“A person ought not to be ashamed of reading a good book because it is simple and popular, and he ought not to condone the faults of a bad book because it is simple and popular.”

4 – Read it again, and again - - -
"An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he 'has read' them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks this settles the matter?"

5 – Read for your own enjoyment - - -
"... And you ought to rely more on yourself than on anyone else in matters of books - that is if you are out for enjoyment and not for improvement or any nonsense of that sort..."

6 – Develop your own taste - be spontaneous - - - don't be unliterary - - -
“They will have no conception [of original taste], because they had no experience, of spontaneous delight in excellence. Their “good” taste will have been acquired by the sweat of their brows, its acquisition will often (and legitimately) have coincided with advancement in the social, [academic] and economic scale, and they will hold it with uneasy intensity. As they will be contemptuous of popular books, so they will be naively tolerant of dullness and difficulty in any quack who comes before them with lofty
pretensions - - - ”

7 – Be ready to be changed - - -
“The first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or the novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.”

8 - Other Characteristics of the Unliterary
"They never read anything that is not narrative. I do not mean they all read fiction. The most unliterary reader sticks to the news; The have no ears. They read exclusively by the eye; They are either quite unconscious of style, or even prefer books which we should think badly written; They enjoy narratives in which the verbal element is reduced to a minimum – strip stories told in pictures, or films with the least possible dialog; They demand swift-moving narrative. Something must always be happening."
Let us be clear that the unliterary are unliterary not because they enjoy stories in these ways., but because they enjoy them in no other way. Not what they have but what they lack cuts them off from the fullness of the literary experience.

9 – Be Ready For a Transcending Experience - - -
“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never myself then when I do.”

10 – Finally, do not be proud of your refined taste: “the moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.”

Happy festive season’s readings.

Cheers,

Paulo

(*) CS Lewis