The Washington Post discusses the joy of reading difficult books.
From the story...
This kind of reading you can't take on lightly, in moments between weeding the garden and answering your e-mail, or after a long day of meetings. You need some serious time -- or some serious sickness and drugs -- to clear the decks for such texts. They presented complex arguments to follow and difficult thoughts to parse. Some paragraphs and pages, even the occasional whole essay or chapter, needed several readings to sink in. Taking notes helped.
It wasn't the writing that called for all that labor, though there was some chewy prose. If my brain was sweating, it was because genuinely subtle, imaginative thinking rarely reads like a thriller. (I know: I own almost the complete works of Robert Ludlum, given to me by my son. He knows that once I pick up one of those trash novels, I can't put it down.)
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The thing is, getting through those complex books, and really grasping what they had to say, gave a thrill such as I hadn't had in ages.
1 comment:
I know the feeling...I get such a high from reading something difficult like Steinbeck. It forces me to slow down and slowly absorb everything he's saying. Its totally a "mental kick"!
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