"Comfort reading"

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. – Elias Canetti 1I am not one for reading projects. I have never planned to read a play of Shakespeare every day until I have read them all or set out to read every novel by a particular author in order of their publication. There are people who every year read all six novels on the Booker Prize shortlist to make a judgement to compare to the jury's or ask "Where to start?" with an author when they (the author) has recently died or been awarded the Nobel Prize (which amounts to the same thing).2 I wonder what they hope to achieve. Despite this, I did plan to read Harvard UP's four-volume Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin in order. And not just in book order but each essay in each book in order. I believed this would enable to me to get a handle on Walter Benjamin's thought better than knowing well the odd essay like The Image of Proust or The Storyteller,…

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