From A Sunday of Liberty I’ve learned that the kindergarten has been in an uproar again. This time it’s over that eternally debated question: can someone read thirty books in a year? First reaction: who cares? Second reaction: what books are we talking about? Third: what do we mean by “read”? For the moment, let’s pretend we care. I think Robert Louis Stevenson covered this nicely in Essays in the Art of Writing:
“The gift of reading, as I
have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast
intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it - by which a man
rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he
differs absolutely wrong.”
My sense is that passionate
reading is extraordinarily rare. A man or woman can be that sort of reader by reading one book a year, if that book is St. Augustine’s Confessions
or Spinoza’s Ethics. Or, at another level, Montaigne’s Essays or Guy
Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination. Absorbing it, arguing with
the author, letting his words change your life. Such volumes carry the imprimatur
of previous generations. There’s a reason for that. The truest critic is time. Many
people, I think, read solely for evidence that the opinions they already hold are being confirmed. The best kind of reading can make you vulnerable and moves you
to question yourself. In other words, it’s not the quantity of books, it’s
quality. And I haven't even mentioned the books we read and reread across a lifetime.
Stevenson was born on this date, November 13,
in 1850, and died in 1894 at age forty-four.
I have never heard the question even raised. As stated, it does not seem to make any distinction of length or density. I suspect that a neighbor reads considerably more than thirty books every year, but I cannot say what those books are and with how much care she reads them.
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