Book Reviews, Comments & Stories, Quotes, & Poetry & More
"Connections and Why They Matter"
Most of what happens in our life will spark a connection. Life connects with what has been found in books. Books connect with what happens in life. Use the connections to help you see more clearly. A love of reading and writing is what motivated the creation of this blog. Thank you for coming to the blog.
Professor Bloom's book teaches you more about him and his opinions in the Preface and Prologue. The rest of the book demonstrates what he wants to say, using other well-known authors.
This review is focused on those two sections. The questions they answer are important to readers, and they offer a guide to those who love books.
Important thoughts: Taken from the Preface & Prologue
"There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read..............it is where shall wisdom be found?
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is the most healing of pleasures.
It returns you to otherness........... Imaginative literature is otherness and, as such, alleviates loneliness.
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable............ This book teaches how to read and why........... never separate the how and the why.
(Quoting Virginia Woolf) The only advice about reading that one person can give another is to take no advice.
Why Read
Because It Matters: if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, they continue to read for themselves.
How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest.
You can read only to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock..................
One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change, alas, is universal. ...........
Read not to contradict and confute, believe and take for granted, or find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
The pleasures of reading are indeed selfish, rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply.....................
Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads."
Where Shall Wisdom be Found? In books.
Why do we read? Because it matters.
Good Thoughts all of which seem relevant to the question raised in "King James Bible" Edition
"He said unto him, What is written in the law? How readest thou?"
