Alan Jacobs, Professor für englische Literatur, reflektiert Rückgewinnung, Erhalt und Ausbau einer vergnügten, vertieften und antwortenden Lesekultur in "The Pleasures to Read in an Age of Distraction" (Oxford Univ Press, 2011).
… set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later—nor am I promising to do so. (42)
(A) good many writers are mature enough to know that they have to take the bad with the good. (54)
The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. (55)
Reading with a writing instrument in hand is an unnatural act for many readers, yet I think in most cases it is necessary to attentive response. (61)
(M)any books become more boring the faster you read them. (74)
This is what makes “readers,” as opposed to “people who read.” To be lost in a book is genuinely addictive: someone who has had it a few times wants it again. (88)
He was being changed, enriched and strengthened and consoled, by what he read. (93)
“There’s a special silence, a reading silence.” (125)
If most of us read too fast, most of us also read too many books and are unwisely reluctant to return to something we think we already know. (128)
A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. (129)
We should note that it’s not what readers are escaping from but what they are escaping into that counts most. (130)
(V)ery little of our growth as readers can be planned. (142)
To practice “accidental sagacity” is to recognize that I don’t really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do… (145)
(F)or many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved. (146)
