the contextual life

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. 

John Locke

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”—Angela Carter

picadorbookroom:

Here’s to one of the greats, Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Karl Hesse. Today is the 50th anniversary of his death.

Today, a barista at one of my favorite coffee shops asked me to recommend books by “American, male authors … written at least 20 years ago.” When I asked her who she last read and liked she said, “Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, and Raymond Chandler” but that I didn’t have to stick to the genres in which these authors wrote.

Here’s my list … pardon any misspellings. 

*I later told her to read Richard Wright

My life

Joel Robison’s Whimsical Photographic Abstractions of the Joy of Reading

[via Brain Pickings]

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small—like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. 

Parnassus on Wheels / Christopher Morley / 1917

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Siri Hustvedt On Reading: 

I discovered ironies in Middlemarch I had not fully appreciated before, no doubt the product of my advancing age, which has been paralleled by the internal accumulation of more and more books that have altered my thoughts and created a broader context for my reading. The text is the same, but I am not (Pg. 137)

Openness to a book is vital, and openness is simply a willingness to be changed by what we read. (Pg. 138)

Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. (Pg. 139)

Reading is creative listening that alters the reader. (Pg. 140)

From Living, Thinking, Looking, by Siri Hustvedt. Picador, p. 133. 2012
This essay was originally published in Columbia; 49 (2011)

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MARTHA GELLHORN ON LONELINESS:

I have my own medicine against loneliness reaching the degree of despair: I read. I read as one swims to shore—when reading anything, I am not there, and therefore not alone; I am somewhere else, in the book, with those people. Probably the reason I read mainly novels; I join other lives. And also when writing because then too, I am not there, not me, not this special mass of blood and flesh with all its tedious problems; I am a conveyor, a tool, I am living in the lives I am making. Beyond these two medicines, I have nothing. But once you accept being lonely, dearest Betsy, it becomes much easier; one is not frightened of being alone.

The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by Caroline Moorehead, pg. 403. Picador 2007

Stay tuned for the HBO film “Hemingway & Gellhorn”, premiering Monday, May 28th at 9pm EST

Photo via Independent.ie

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
—Benjamin Franklin

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.”
—Samuel Johnson

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin

Image by Victor Barrera