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I have loved reading since I was a little girl. I guess I will never forget the curiosity and enthusiasm with which I would wait for my father to come back from work and see if he bought a new paperback. He was the one who taught us the love of the printed word, and I will always be grateful for this. Among a handful of strong and healthy life principles, what better inheritance than reading can a child wish for?
I grew up with books, and regardless the change in preferences that I came across with the passage of time, they always stood by my side as a faithful companion. I went on to study Letters simply because I had a single certainty: that I loved books. Reading was significant to me and I wanted to spend more time in understanding this art.
Years went by and one of the most important lessons I learned is that reading is personal. Besides classifications and literary genres, besides the canon and all the rules, reading is one of the freest art forms... These are too small words to express what reading means to me. However, since I discovered Virginia Woolf I kept advising people to read the essays „How should one read a book?” and „Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. There might have been other books which increased my awareness of the importance of reading in one's life, but I don't remember them now.
These past few days I received "Stop what you're doing and read this!", a collection of ten savoury essays about reading, which I enjoyed today and yesterday. I found numerous ideas, feelings or memories I had in common with the authors and at times I simply couldn't stop myself from smiling at the resemblance.
I selected for you some of the quotes I loved most:
''This is what books - the best books - give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely." (Blake Morrison)
"To this day I do not move outside the house without a book; inside my house they are my paintings, my decorations, my fellow travellers and my comfort." (Carmen Callil)
"Books, light-bulb ideas about publishing them, children who use them to make sense of life will always exist. The human race will read for as long as it survives on this Earth. And books and reading stand there like the largest defensive army in the history of the world, showing us how to do that. Publishers of books, be it in print or on the Internet, are the foot soldiers of this army. On they go, on they must go." (Carmen Callil)
"If we read fast, superficially, for plot, to get through, so as to congratulate ourselves we've read a big book that everybody else is reading, or just to get a shot of intense feeling, we're not only missing out on certain pleasures, we're actually putting ourselves at risk, leaving ourselves open to messages and attitudes we haven't weighed up, allowing ourselves to be troubled or enthused, or even terrified, without really knowing if there's any cause to be." (Tim Parks)
"Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time."(Tim Parks)
"Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn't guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and stay friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it's we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find out that we don't get along any more." (Mark Haddon )
In conclusion, enjoy reading!
