hanover

A habit that has stayed with me since uni is putting little brackets around passages in the books I read. It was so important when I was first learning to write essays because I needed to be able to specify exactly where any quotes or ideas I used came from. 

Now, I still do it with pretty much any book I read (unless I don't own the book) even though I generally don't write essays these days. 

we can do nothing against the truth

It's hard to write a biography because there are so many different versions of events that all hold some truth. Even a made-up story carries meaning. 

some famous booktok tropes

'faces a reader makes'

addicted to books

more sticky tabs than pages

the 'aesthetic' of the reading 'lifestyle' as a separate thing from actually reading   

the long and the short

I'm prejudiced against short books, but when a book overcomes that prejudice and I can see that it holds real value, I then appreciate that book all the more. Examples include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom. 

There's nothing like a book that is both really long and really good though, and there are a lot of examples of that - The Idiot and The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky, War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, to name a few. 

the death of the artist

Why do we read? It's hard to answer that question. There's no doubt that we get something real and substantial from our engagement with texts. 

The question of ‘why’ is related to the question of ‘what’. What is a text? What does engaging with a text involve? 

In high school we had the idea that the kind of analysis undertaken in the course of criticism, theory and the study of English - that that was pointless. It didn't help us to appreciate or understand the text, but anyway, reading itself - engaging with all of these texts - is pointless, so we thought. 

Barthes distinguishes between the 'work' and the 'text', where the work is the words on the page - the artifact - and the text is the mental field that the work gives rise to.... something like that. 

We don't think of the way we respond to music as a kind of reading, but it is. The same is true of art, ads and stuff written on packaging labels. So, I can do a close reading of the packaging of my acrylic paints set. The box asserts that:

Whether you're planning a masterpiece or you want to try acrylic painting for the first time - this set is ready for anything. 

So, 'this set' is autonomous. This set of paints is more proactive than you...only just. While you are only 'planning' or 'wanting' to try, the paints are 'ready'. Whether you are a professional artist or a novice, it's immaterial to 'this set', which is ready regardless. You are just the vehicle for these paints to make their art.

only natural

Part of discovering the truth is the realization that it's not what you think it is. That realization is not something to be feared. It's liberating to break free from the illusion that we always know the truth when we see it - that judging the truth comes naturally. 

quotidian supernature

The thing that's interesting and mysterious about this idea of beginning a new life, which is also a continuation of your old life, is the reality that the two lives both continue. It's like there are two personas within the one person. 

That's something that I think confuses a lot of people. It confused me. When I first became a Christian, because of everything the Bible says about being a new creation, and being born again, and so on, I thought that, when I take that step and I actually become a Christian, the old me would be no more. That's why it was such a difficult step to take. 

But then when I did take the step, it was an anti-climax. Here I was - the same. It was a relief, but it was also a huge challenge, because now I had to do all the things that I thought a Christian does but with the same old nature that I had always had.