Ok, I’ve decided something. I’ve been posting quotes from the books I’m reading to social media, Instagram mostly, and I just can’t do it anymore. Long story. Still working on how to explain my issue there. I’m going to try something else for a while.
For the rest of the month of May, each time I sit down with the book I’m reading, I’m going to pull something out from those pages and write about it here. No pretty graphics, no trying to get a good keyword, no SEO stuff, just me thinking back on what I just read. I may post more than once a day this way, and some days I won’t post at all.
I’m almost to the end of How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, so I’ll be jumping to the end pretty quickly. Going back to the beginning of the book and summarizing just isn’t my style. I may do some of that for my last post about each book I read, but for right now I’m jumping in right where I am.
“…’purism.’ This is the error of supposing that a given book can be read in only one way. It is an error because books are not pure in character, and that in turn is due to the fact that the human mind, which writes and reads them, is rooted in the senses and imagination and moves or is moved by emotions and sentiment.”
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
Every book we read has so much inside it and so much we bring to it, that every reading is different. It’s like a friendship. You meet in elementary school, and then again in high school or college. Years later, you happen to run into each other at the airport or the grocery store. You are years older, so much has happened, that you feel like strangers. Maybe you meet again at your high school or university’s 40th Reunion and it’s all different again.
There is no one way we meet an author through their work.