Books and life

I have always maintained (inside my head and blogs) that I would not be the person that I am today without books. They have fundamentally changed how I see and understand my world and the people in it. So I got a thrill out of reading this fantastically quioxitic excerpt from James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Also check out the always insightful review from Falstaff.

Via Falstaff 

Quote of the Day

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on.You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught how to read it

~ by Sonia on August 6, 2008.