from Mark Edmundson, Why Read?:

"Practitioners of all disciplines must promise something, implicitly or overtly. They tell their students that eventually they will possess a certain sort of knowledge. To thrive in a university, a department must promise some kind of desirable prowess, whether it be understanding of the physical world, knoweldge of history's laws, or, in this case, a capacity to analyze and describe works of art as though they were species of fauna. We have made literary study fit in, be good at school. But true humanistic study is not geared to generalized, portable truths; it is geared to human transformation.. And that is something that catalogues cannot describe and to which the writing of detached literary critical essays is more or less irrelevant.

Works that matter work differently. Such works, in history, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, and literature, can do many things, but preeminent among them is their capacity to offer truth. So far we've left the quest of truth to Falwell and to faith. We, the supposed heirs of Socrates, have fled from our authentic vocations. Perhaps it is time again to confront the Sphinx, who now, as always, poses the riddle of life: What use will you make of the world? (And what use might it make of you?) How do you intend to live? It is time, perhaps, to help our students look into the Sphinx's eye (and to look there ourselves); time to see what we see." (51)

from Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading:

“We read to find the end, for the story's sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers, oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, skipping pages.... We read in gusts of sudden pleasure, without knowing what brought the pleasure along. 'What in the world is this emotion?' asks Rebecca West after reading King Lear. 'What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel so glad?' We don't know: We read ignorantly. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us — the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something which we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is." (303)

from Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading:

"To read at all, we must read the book of ourselves in the texts in front of us, and we must bring the text home, into our thoughts and lives, into our judgments and deeds. We cannot enter the texts we read, but they can enter us. That is what reading is all about." (6)

"Reading is not just a means to other ends. It is one of the great rewards for the use of our capacities, a reason for living, an end in itself." (18)

from Sven Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age:

"What the writer writes, how he writes and gets edited, printed, and sold, and then read — all of the old assumptions are under siege. And these are just the outward manifestations. Still deeper shifts are taking place in the subjective realm. As the printed book, and the ways of the book — of writing and reading — are modified, as electronic communications assert dominance, 'the feel' of the literary engagement is altered. Reading and writing come to mean differently; they acquire new significations. As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise. As we ponder that act, profound questions must arise about our avowedly humanistic values, about spiritual versus material concerns, and about subjectivity itself." (5-6)

About the Books...