Nothing about me precludes something about reading...A post graduate in english literature and education, keen to pursue a Ph.D in children's literature....i am a sum of all that i have read (which is never enough:)....before sending me a friend request...please leave me a note...
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its...
more »
Nothing about me precludes something about reading...A post graduate in english literature and education, keen to pursue a Ph.D in children's literature....i am a sum of all that i have read (which is never enough:)....before sending me a friend request...please leave me a note...
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.
The old idea of the intellectual as the one who speaks truth to power is still an idea worth holding on to. Tyrants fear the truth of books because it’s a truth that’s in hock to nobody; it’s a single artist’s unfettered vision of the world. They fear it even more because it’s incomplete, because the act of reading completes it, so that the book’s truth is slightly different in each reader’s different inner world, and these are the true revolutions of literature, these invisible, intimate communions of strangers, these tiny revolutions inside each reader’s imagination; and the enemies of the imagination, politburos, ayatollahs, all the different goon squads of gods and power, want to shut these revolutions down, and can’t. Not even the author of a book can know exactly what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects, and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.....Salman Rushdie
« less
