Rereading Essays
The shift showed up bit by bit, then all at once. Most problems with long books turn out to be problems with time.
Where it started
Margins are where reading turns into thinking. A friend once described essays as still work, and the phrase stuck. The best advice I got was plainly to slow down. I read it once fast and once bit by bit, and they were different books. Looking back, the difficult approach was the right call.
Lessons
Every reading list says as much about the reader as the books. If something here is unclear, that is on me, not you. I abandoned it halfway and came back a year later, glad I did.
It is effortless to overthink reading bit by bit. It is harder to just start. If you only take one thing from this, make it the part about libraries. It is not glamorous, but it holds up. For a long time I treated reading lists as an afterthought. Translations are a conversation between two writers and a reader.
- Start with second-hand books and nothing else
- Ask someone at the reading room
- Start with poetry and nothing else
second-hand books