Words for Wednesday

There are many different reasons for reading: escape, enlightenment, knowledge, for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words in your mind; and having help along the way, through a book group, a book reviewer, or just individual study only enhances the reading experience.

I just started Old School by Tobias Wolff and in the opening pages he describes studying literature at a boarding school:

How did they command such deference – English teachers? …they tended to be polymaths.  Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They’d stitch it back together with history, psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science.  Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

Add to that this quote from Zadie Smith, author of On Beauty and Changing My Mind, who has just accepted a position as reviewer for Harpers:

“I think a good book review is a place to meet a book on its own terms,” said Smith, “not as an ideological vehicle or an academic plaything. Often people think of writing as primary and reading as the
lesser art; in my life it’s the other way around. When I write about books I’m trying to honor reading as a creative act: as far as I’m concerned the job is not simply to describe an end product but to delineate a process, an intimate experience with a book which the general reader understands just as well as the professional critic.”

Two different ways of looking at literature – one more academic, one more intimate – both legitimate pathways to take and sometimes, the road may even be the same.