'The Gift of Reading'

From A Sunday of Liberty I’ve learned that the kindergarten has been in an uproar again. This time it’s over that eternally debated question: can someone read thirty books in a year? First reaction: who cares? Second reaction: what books are we talking about? Third: what do we mean by “read”? For the moment, let’s pretend we care. I think Robert Louis Stevenson covered this nicely in Essays in the Art of Writing: “The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it - by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong.” My sense is that passionate reading is extraordinarily rare. A man or woman can be that sort of reader by reading one book a year, if that book is St. Augustine’s Confessions or Spinoza’s Ethics. Or, at another level, Montaigne’s Essays or Guy Davenport’s The Geography…

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