Reading

I came cross this in the Culture Making blog this week. Being an ex-lit student I think she's on to something. I love the process of ripping books apart, trying to find nuggets of what the author wants to say through vocab. The last sentence is particularly thought provoking. Seeing as the only thing I've read this read this week has been Grazia I'm challenged to do a bit better in my literary habits. Good old Virgina Woolf.

Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

from "The Love of Reading," by Virginia Woolf, from her Essays, vol. 5, excerpted in The Guardian, 17 January 2009