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Thread: How to read

  1. #46
    Haribol Acharya blazeofglory's Avatar
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    In fact all I do is I kind of choose a particular book depending upon my moods. If I feel buoyant and cheery I read serious books like Dostoevsky and if I am not in a proper mood or feeling bored I choose to read lighter kinds and at times I read Arabian nights and they are really interesting stories and that take me to a different world wherein different values, traditions, systems exist and in fact they are light stories but they are not light philosophically. In fact reading is like living to me and now I am drunk with books and living without books is almost unthinkable to me and in essence books rejuvenate me.

    In fact books are the reservoirs thru which I kind of inundate myself with and everyday books renew me and energize me wholly. Reading style and methods are not learned but they go naturally

    “Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””

    “If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.

  2. #47
    Still, on a chalk plateau Bar22do's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blazeofglory View Post
    In fact all I do is I kind of choose a particular book depending upon my moods. If I feel buoyant and cheery I read serious books like Dostoevsky and if I am not in a proper mood or feeling bored I choose to read lighter kinds and at times I read Arabian nights and they are really interesting stories and that take me to a different world wherein different values, traditions, systems exist and in fact they are light stories but they are not light philosophically. In fact reading is like living to me and now I am drunk with books and living without books is almost unthinkable to me and in essence books rejuvenate me.

    In fact books are the reservoirs thru which I kind of inundate myself with and everyday books renew me and energize me wholly. Reading style and methods are not learned but they go naturally
    I fell upon your post here a bit by chance - while I am myself re-reading Proust's short text "On Reading" where he describes how reading is his absolute need and his life breath... a little as you say; it is for him a sort of communication with his own solitude, or rather - within his solitude, spicing his mind with the beginings of new perspectives where the author's are ending... This gem of a text is a praise of reading, preparing much to how to read (but this is perhaps my personal feeling only) his A la Recherche du Temps Perdu... I thought that might be interesting for you, so here it is, shared. And thanks for your sharing as well. Bar

  3. #48
    running amok Sancho's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kiki1982 View Post
    It depends, like you said, on what you are reading, but Shakespeare with a glass of wine... I'd be surprised that by the end of the glass I was still concentrated and was just reading the words and not taking them in ...
    I know exactly what you mean. I had a similar experience last summer while reading an account of 16th century Spanish Exploradors in the Americas. I was sitting on my back porch, enjoying a tall-cool one, and burning one of Uncle Fidel’s Torpedos, when I got to the bottom of a page and realized I had no clue what I’d just read. So I read it again. No luck. So I snubbed out the cigar, went inside, poured another tall one, and flipped on the TV.

    Hey, last night I found a good book on reading after chatting with MorpheusSandman about speed-reading: Reading Like a Writer, a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, by Francine Prose; Harper Perennial, 2007. I’ve been reading her short subjects in magazines like Harpers for years. To me she is one of the most readable writers still writing. Here’s an excerpt from page three:

    As I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.

    I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made.
    Uhhhh...

  4. #49
    A Student
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    I found thinking "What purpose does this (insert literary mechanism here) serve?" as useful. One teacher always harped that, "Authors don't do things on accident; they do them on purpose." While taking that adage as a way to analyze literature may be limited, it's helpful nonetheless.

  5. #50
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    "I will, myself, admit that appreciation of my work is improved by drink."
    - William Shakespeare to his friend Richard Burbage in a letter, now in the Stratford Corp. archives

  6. #51
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    In my experience everthing in reading comes through practice. Back in the day when I actually read it were the previous readings that made the one author's became more legible. I woudn't understand some books of philosophy if I hadn't already read, though and discussed some other pontual ideas and problems, even in the internet. Simple stuff that made my comprehension of a topic raise little by little. That is about the ideas. About gramatical complexity, it were the struggle to understand progressively more difficult authors that gave me the capacity to understand others.

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