essay book reading

Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas

As a writer, you love to read and talk to others about reading books. Check out some examples of essays about reading and topic ideas for your essay.

Many people fall in love with good books at an early age, as experiencing the joy of reading can help transport a child’s imagination to new places. Reading isn’t just for fun, of course—the importance of reading has been shown time and again in educational research studies.

If you love to sit down with a good book, you likely want to share your love of reading with others. Reading can offer a new perspective and transport readers to different worlds, whether you’re into autobiographies, books about positive thinking, or stories that share life lessons.

When explaining your love of reading to others, it’s important to let your passion shine through in your writing. Try not to take a negative view of people who don’t enjoy reading, as reading and writing skills are tougher for some people than others.

Talk about the positive effects of reading and how it’s positively benefitted your life. Offer helpful tips on how people can learn to enjoy reading, even if it’s something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. Remember, your goal when writing essays about reading is to make others interested in exploring the world of books as a source of knowledge and entertainment.

Now, let’s explore some popular essays on reading to help get you inspired and some topics that you can use as a starting point for your essay about how books have positively impacted your life.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers

Examples Of Essays About Reading

1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times
2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan
3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

4. How ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ Saved Me By Isaac Fitzgerald

5. catcher in the rye: that time a banned book changed my life by pat kelly, topic ideas for essays about reading, 1. how can a high school student improve their reading skills, 2. what’s the best piece of literature ever written, 3. how reading books from authors of varied backgrounds can provide a different perspective, 4. challenging your point of view: how reading essays you disagree with can provide a new perspective.

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1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times

“My error the first time around was to read “Middlemarch” as one would a typical novel. But “Middlemarch” isn’t really about plot and dialogue. It’s all about character, as mediated through the wise and compassionate (but sharply astute) voice of the omniscient narrator. The book shows us that we cannot live without other people and that we cannot live with other people unless we recognize their flaws and foibles in ourselves.” The New York Times

In this collection of reader essays, people share the books that have shaped how they see the world and live their lives. Talking about a life-changing piece of literature can offer a new perspective to people who tend to shy away from reading and can encourage others to pick up your favorite book.

2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan

“Consistent reading helps you develop your analytical thinking skills over time. It stimulates your brain and allows you to think in new ways. When you are actively engaged in what you’re reading, you would be able to ask better questions, look at things from a different perspective, identify patterns and make connections.” Anangsha Alammyan

Alammyan shares how she got away from habits that weren’t serving her life (such as scrolling on social media) and instead turned her attention to focus on reading. She shares how she changed her schedule and time management processes to allow herself to devote more time to reading, and she also shares the many ways that she benefited from spending more time on her Kindle and less time on her phone.

3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

“When my learning specialist convinced me that I was an intelligent person with a reading disorder, I gradually stopped hiding from what I was most afraid of—the belief that I was a person of mediocre intelligence with overambitious goals for herself. As I slowly let go of this fear, I became much more aware of my learning issues. For the first time, I felt that I could dig below the surface of my unhappiness in school without being ashamed of what I might find.” Blair Kenney

Reading does not come easily to everyone, and dyslexia can make it especially difficult for a person to process words. In this essay, Kenney shares her experience of being diagnosed with dyslexia during her sophomore year of college at Yale. She gave herself more patience, grew in her confidence, and developed techniques that worked to improve her reading and processing skills.

“I took that book home to finish reading it. I’d sit somewhat uncomfortably in a tree or against a stone wall or, more often than not, in my sparsely decorated bedroom with the door closed as my mother had hushed arguments with my father on the phone. There were many things in the book that went over my head during my first time reading it. But a land left with neither Rhyme nor Reason, as I listened to my parents fight, that I understood.” Isaac Fitzgerald

Books can transport a reader to another world. In this essay, Fitzgerald explains how Norton Juster’s novel allowed him to escape a difficult time in his childhood through the magic of his imagination. Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts.

“From the first paragraph my mind was blown wide open. It not only changed my whole perspective on what literature could be, it changed the way I looked at myself in relation to the world. This was heavy stuff. Of the countless books I had read up to this point, even the ones written in first person, none of them felt like they were speaking directly to me. Not really anyway.” Pat Kelly

Many readers have had the experience of feeling like a book was written specifically for them, and in this essay, Kelly shares that experience with J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel. Writing about a book that felt like it was written specifically for you can give you the chance to share what was happening in your life when you read the book and the lasting impact that the book had on you as a person.

There are several topic options to choose from when you’re writing about reading. You may want to write about how literature you love has changed your life or how others can develop their reading skills to derive similar pleasure from reading.

Middle and high school students who struggle with reading can feel discouraged when, despite their best efforts, their skills do not improve. Research the latest educational techniques for boosting reading skills in high school students (the research often changes) and offer concrete tips (such as using active reading skills) to help students grow.

It’s an excellent persuasive essay topic; it’s fun to write about the piece of literature you believe to be the greatest of all time. Of course, much of this topic is a matter of opinion, and it’s impossible to prove that one piece of literature is “better” than another. Write your essay about how the piece of literature you consider the best positive affected your life and discuss how it’s impacted the world of literature in general.

The world is full of many perspectives and points of view, and it can be hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Reading books by authors of different gender, race, or socioeconomic status can help open your eyes to the challenges and issues others face. Explain how reading books by authors with different backgrounds has changed your worldview in your essay.

It’s fun to read the information that reinforces viewpoints that you already have, but doing so doesn’t contribute to expanding your mind and helping you see the world from a different perspective. Explain how pushing oneself to see a different point of view can help you better understand your perspective and help open your eyes to ideas you may not have considered.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

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✍️Essay On Books: Free Samples for Students

Updated on
Nov 2, 2023

Books are considered human’s best friend. It has been an integral part of human society for ages and will continue to be a crucial part of human life. There are several categories of books, that offer us knowledge about specific fields. Words written in books serve as a source of knowledge, information, and entertainment , which are necessary for skill enhancement and polishing the language. Books are written in every language to fulfill the needs of people living in every region from villages to abroad. In this blog, you will get to know how to write an essay on books and we have also provided some sample essays on books for you. Keep Reading!

Table of Contents

1 Short Essay on Books
2 Essay on Books in 150 Words
3.1 Different Genres of Books
3.2 Benefits of Reading Books

Also Read: 15 Best-Selling Books of All Times

Short Essay on Books

Books are pages filled with ideas, thoughts, stories, imagination, and knowledge. Even after extreme advancements in technology , books continue to be cherished by humans. The reason behind that is the convenience and their appeal.

Given below are some short sample essays on books that will help school-going children and students:

Essay on Books in 150 Words

Books are considered true friends of humans, as they can teach us life lessons. Books are the repositories that impart wisdom and knowledge. From ancient times to today’s digital world, books have served as a source of inspiration, expanding the thought process and imparting education.

In schools, they teach us how reading books can shape our future and when a person grows, the impact of his learning through books is reflected in his lifestyle. In an era of mobile phones, smartphones, television, and laptops, we all still trust books. Books provide deep knowledge about any specific subject without any modifications.

Books possess the ability to ignite your imagination and take you to a completely different world. Some readers value books as humans, some highlight the important parts, some readers make collections of limited editions of books, and some even cherish the smell of old books. The cover and physical appearance of the books on the bookshelf reflect comfort.

Thus, books play an important role in everyone’s life. Nowadays movies are also directed based on famous books.

Essay on Books in 300 words

Books help mankind to evolve mentally. The thoughts of a person reflect his/her personality and the thoughts are developed based on your learning in life. As mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, books are considered the powerhouse of knowledge and information. The vintage look of the book adds charm to its appearance and such books attract the reader. Holding a book in hand, flipping pages while reading, using beautiful bookmarks in the book, and sensing the texture of pages can deeply imply a sensory effect on the readers.

Different Genres of Books

A book reader can enjoy a variety of genres of books. In spite of technological advancements in human life, thousands of books are released in the market. The budding writers also publish their books as they know the fact that good readers still prefer to read from books. If you do not want to purchase the hard copy of the book then, you can go for the online version.

Following are some of the genres of books:

Travel books- Such books tell the story and experience of travellers.
Motivational books- Like “Atomic Habits” are used to inspire and motivate people to adopt good habits in life.
Fictional books- Like “As You Like It” that represent literary fiction and play.
Novel- it comes under the most read books by the reader. Novels are the long work of narrative fiction framed in prose.

Benefits of Reading Books

There are many benefits of reading books. Books help to increase our vocabulary and enhance our knowledge of a variety of subjects. They also serve as a good source of entertainment during free time. It boosts the ability of the reader to think creatively. They help in improving the fluency and enhance the communication skills . Books are a great source of knowledge it would help us in public speaking , debates, quizzes, examinations, etc.

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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Essay on Advantages of Reading Books

Students are often asked to write an essay on Advantages of Reading Books in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Advantages of Reading Books

Introduction.

Reading books is a great habit with many benefits. It helps in improving knowledge, enhancing imagination, and building vocabulary.

Knowledge Enhancement

Books are a rich source of information. Reading books on various subjects imparts information and increases understanding of various topics.

Imagination Boost

Reading fiction can transport you to different worlds, enhancing your imagination and creativity.

Vocabulary Building

Regular reading exposes you to new words, helping in improving your vocabulary and language skills.

250 Words Essay on Advantages of Reading Books

Reading books is a timeless activity that holds numerous benefits. In a world where digital distractions abound, books provide an enriching escape that nourishes the mind and soul.

Cognitive Development

Reading books regularly can significantly enhance cognitive abilities. It fosters concentration, improves vocabulary, and stimulates critical thinking. By presenting diverse perspectives and complex narratives, books challenge readers to analyze and interpret information, thereby honing their reasoning skills.

Emotional Intelligence

Books are a window to the human experience. They expose readers to a variety of emotions, situations, and personalities, fostering empathy and emotional intelligence. By identifying with characters and their struggles, readers can better understand and navigate their own emotions.

Knowledge Acquisition

Books are a treasure trove of knowledge. They offer insights into a plethora of subjects, from science and history to philosophy and arts. This knowledge not only enhances one’s understanding of the world but also encourages informed discussions and debates.

Stress Reduction

Reading is a form of escapism that can significantly reduce stress. Immersing oneself in a compelling narrative can distract from daily pressures, providing relaxation and mental tranquility.

500 Words Essay on Advantages of Reading Books

Reading books is a timeless activity that has been a part of human culture for centuries. Despite the advent of technology and digital media, the significance of reading books remains undiminished. This essay aims to shed light on the numerous advantages that reading books offers, particularly for college students.

Enhancement of Cognitive Abilities

Reading is much more than just a leisure activity. It is a cognitive exercise that strengthens the brain’s functions. Reading complex narratives and academic texts requires concentration, comprehension, and memory, all of which enhance cognitive abilities. According to a study by the American Academy of Neurology, engaging the brain in activities like reading can slow cognitive decline by 32%.

Boosting Emotional Intelligence

Knowledge acquisition and skill development.

Books are a treasure trove of knowledge. They provide insights into various fields, cultures, philosophies, and historical events. Reading a wide range of books exposes students to different ideas and viewpoints, broadening their understanding of the world. Moreover, books can help students develop specific skills. For example, reading literature can improve writing skills, while reading scientific texts can enhance analytical thinking.

Stress Reduction and Mental Health

Immersing oneself in a good book can be a great stress reliever. It provides an escape from reality, allowing readers to explore different worlds and experiences. According to a study by the University of Sussex, reading can reduce stress levels by up to 68%. Furthermore, reading has been linked to improved mental health, with regular readers showing lower levels of depressive symptoms.

Improving Focus and Discipline

In conclusion, reading books offers a multitude of benefits, from enhancing cognitive abilities and emotional intelligence to facilitating knowledge acquisition and skill development. It also contributes to stress reduction and improved mental health, while fostering focus and discipline. While digital media and technology have their place in learning, the value of reading books should not be underestimated. For college students, reading can be a powerful tool for personal and academic growth.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Happy studying!

Essay On Importance Of Reading Books In 150 To 500 Words

Read an excellent essay on the topic “The Importance of Reading Books.” Below you can read a 150-to-500 word essay on the importance of reading books for all students and children.

I hope you will find this the best essay. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts as we have provided a comment section at the end of every page.

Table of Contents

Long & Short 150 To 500 Words Essay On Importance Of Reading Books

Reading book is a great habit . To be successful, you have to read a lot of books and novels. People who do not appreciate reading miss a lot in their lives. Reading opens a window of knowledge for people. Knowledge is power, and power can make you successful in facing this competitive world.

Reading makes you more creative, more innovative, and sharpens your brain. Knowledge makes you great. Reading books, newspapers, and novels will expand your vocabulary, which is very important for verbal communication with other people. So, if you want to be successful in life , start reading books and novels today.

It pays off in life. In today’s world, technology is changing rapidly. People are very busy with their daily routines at work, and no longer have time to read books and novels. However, reading books and novels will spare you the stress and boredom of your everyday life. It brings a lot of positive changes to your personality. That makes you very good. person.

If a person has a nice habit of reading, he can achieve a lot in his life. He can learn so much in his life from reading good passage and novels. A reader should have the ability to focus properly while reading books and novels.

When a person has improved their ability to concentrate, they can do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Reading brings you a lot of joy and satisfaction. After reading a beautiful book, you will find reassurance and satisfaction. It is an excellent habit to take books with you to read every day.

Reading can make you very successful in your life. Reading gives you moral support and enables you to come out of negative thoughts. It changes you, your personality, and your thinking.

It’s a great experience when you come across interesting novels. Everyone should have a reading habit because it changes their lives.

Your favorite book doesn’t need to be related to your job or your career. It can be related to anything else. It’s just because you have a keen interest in this topic and you can learn a lot from it.

Reading books and novels changes the way you think. It helps you make good life choices. It teaches you to stay positive

Reading books makes you great. It also encourages creative thinking. It helps develop your imagination and creative skills.

So, if you want to refer to someone as successful, intelligent, and great, name him/her as a reader. If you want to see the world differently with new eyes, read books.

When you’re tired after a hectic day at work or school, open your book and start reading.

When you indulge in your favorite books, the whole world changes around you.

Reading a good novel or book is a great experience. It brings a lot of peace and contentment to your life.

So what are you waiting for? Bring your favorite book or novel with you now.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Reading Books — The Benefits of Growing up and Reading Books

The Benefits of Growing Up and Reading Books

Categories: Personal Life Reading Books

About this sample

Words: 911 |

Published: Aug 14, 2018

Words: 911 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Read and grow: my literary journey.

Mol, S. E., Bus, A. G., & de Jong, M. T. (2009). Interactive book reading in early education: A tool to stimulate print knowledge as well as oral language. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 979-1007.
Morrison, F. J., & Griffith, E. M. (2019). Building attention, memory, and early reading skills through interactive shared book reading. In Shared Book Reading (pp. 167-190). Routledge.
Krashen, S. D. (2004). The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
McQuillan, J., & Krashen, S. (2008). Explaining the Flynn effect. Reading Psychology, 29(2), 135-142.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

Book cover of The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

10 Must-Read New Books Out in Fall 2024 to Preorder Now

How Reading Makes Us More Human

A debate has erupted over whether reading fiction makes human beings more moral. But what if its real value consists in something even more fundamental?

A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay , "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response , Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter and nicer," among other things. Yet these essays aren't so much coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.

To advance her thesis, Paul cites studies by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Taken together, their findings suggest that those "who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective." It's the kind of thing writer Joyce Carol Oates is talking about when she says, "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

Oatley and Mar's conclusions are supported, Paul argues, by recent studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. This research shows that "deep reading -- slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity -- is a distinctive experience," a kind of reading that differs in kind and quality from "the mere decoding of words" that constitutes a good deal of what passes for reading today, particularly for too many of our students in too many of our schools (as I have previously written about here ).

Paul concludes her essay with a reference to the literary critic Frank Kermode, who famously distinguishes between "carnal reading" -- characterized by the hurried, utilitarian information processing that constitutes the bulk of our daily reading diet -- and "spiritual reading," reading done with focused attention for pleasure, reflection, analysis, and growth. It is in this distinction that we find the real difference between the warring factions in what might be a chicken-or-egg scenario: Does great literature make people better, or are good people drawn to reading great literature?

Currie is asking whether reading great literature makes readers more moral -- a topic taken up by Aristotle in Poetics (which makes an ethical apology for literature) . Currie cites as counter-evidence the well-read, highly cultured Nazis. The problem with this (aside from falling into the trap of Godwin's Law ) is that the Nazis were, in fact, acting in strict conformity to the dictates of a moral code, albeit the perverse code of the Third Reich. But Paul examines the connection of great literature not to our moral selves, but to our spiritual selves.

What good literature can do and does do -- far greater than any importation of morality -- is touch the human soul.

Reading is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. As many scholars have noted, and Paul too mentions in her piece, reading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual -- however one understands that word -- about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to "read" means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of "interpreting" in the sense of "reading" a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities.

It is "spiritual reading" -- not merely decoding -- that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others. This is why the way we read can be even more important than what we read. In fact, reading good literature won't make a reader a better person any more than sitting in a church, synagogue or mosque will. But reading good books well just might.

It did for me. As I relayed in my literary and spiritual memoir , the books I have read over a lifetime have shaped my worldview, my beliefs, and my life as much as anything else. From Great Expectations I learned the power the stories we tell ourselves have to do either harm and good, to ourselves and to others; from Death of a Salesman I learned the dangers of a corrupt version of the American Dream; from Madame Bovary, I learned to embrace the real world rather than escaping into flights of fancy; from Gulliver's Travels I learned the profound limitations of my own finite perspective; and from Jane Eyre I learned how to be myself. These weren't mere intellectual or moral lessons, although they certainly may have begun as such. Rather, the stories from these books and so many others became part of my life story and then, gradually, part of my very soul.

As Eugene H. Peterson explains in Eat this Book , "Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated, taken into the soul -- eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight." Peterson describes this ancient art of lectio divina, or spiritual reading, as "reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes ... love and wisdom." More than the books themselves, it is the skills and the desire to read in this way which comprise the essential gift we must give our students and ourselves. But this won't happen by way of nature or by accident.

Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain , has studied "deep reading" in the context of the science of the brain. She describes the fragility of the brain's ability to read with the kind of sustained attention that allows literature to wield its shaping power over us:

The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. ... Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read--and what we absorb from our reading -- will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.

The power of "spiritual reading" is its ability to transcend the immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at hand. This isn't the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to the quantifiable data Currie seeks, although Paul demonstrates is possible, to measure. Even so, such reading doesn't make us better so much as it makes us human .

About the Author

The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life.

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Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation – and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it.

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How Should One Read a Book?

Read as if one were writing it.

A painting of a woman reading at a table.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Young Girl Reading , c. 1868. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters.

Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek? I will lay before you some of the thoughts that have come to me on such an occasion as this. But you will notice the note of interrogation at the end of my title. One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts; those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read “Paradise Lost” as to see that it is a great poem, or “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” so as to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own.

And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds, people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species—as if there were only tortoises or nothing but tigers. It makes them furious to find a novelist bringing Queen Victoria to the throne six months before her time; they will praise a poet enthusiastically for teaching them that a violet has four petals and a daisy almost invariably ten. You will save a great deal of time and temper better kept for worthier objects if you will try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has its fur, the other has its baldness.

To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.

Yes; but for all that the problem is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face. In order that we may realize, however briefly and crudely, the main divisions into which novelists group themselves, let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident—this meeting a beggar in the street. Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but of narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise therefore. This happened, as he tells us on the first pages of” Robinson Crusoe,” on the first of September. More subtly and artfully, he will hypnotize us into a state of belief by dropping out casually some little unnecessary fact—for instance, “my father called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout.” His father’s gout is not necessary to the story, but it is necessary to the truth of the story, for it is thus that anybody who is speaking the truth adds some small irrelevant detail without thinking. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.

But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know. “Matrimony as the origin of change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s character seen from three different points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.

Now let Thomas Hardy choose the same theme—a beggar met in the street—and at once two great changes will be visible. The street will be transformed into a vast and sombre heath; the man or woman will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue. Further, the relations of this human being will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as law-giver, towards those powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed. All the qualities which were admirable in “Robinson Crusoe,” admirable in “Emma,” will be neglected or absent. The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the clear, exact brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim at first that he is “melodramatic” or “unreal” compared with them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other; and Hardy, who is a novelist of the dark side, will contrive that no clear, steady light falls upon his people’s faces, that they are not closely observed in drawing rooms, that they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal and four-square like Defoe, nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical. Where Jane Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be found confusing us (as so many lesser writers do) by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book.

Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that. Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own in one direction rather than in another. He instinctively accepts Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen’s, and, reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author’s genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.

Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.

If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations. Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power. All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books—that is to say, works of pure imagination. That they serve also to impart knowledge and to improve the mind is true and important, but if we are considering how to read books for pleasure, not how to provide an adequate pension for one’s widow, this other property of theirs is even more valuable and important. But here again one should know what one is after. One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power. One has left one’s bare and angular tower and is strolling along the street looking in at the open windows. After solitude and concentration, the open air, the sight of other people absorbed in innumerable activities, comes upon us with an indescribable fascination.

The windows of the houses are open; the blinds are drawn up. One can see the whole household without their knowing that they are being seen. One can see them sitting round the dinner table, talking, reading, playing games. Sometimes they seem to be quarrelling—but what about? Or they are laughing—but what is the joke? Down in the basement the cook is reading a newspaper aloud, while the housemaid is making a piece of toast; in comes the kitchen maid and they all start talking at the same moment—but what are they saying? Upstairs a girl is dressing to go to a party. But where is she going? There is an old lady sitting at her bedroom window with some kind of wool work in her hand and a fine green parrot in a cage beside her. And what is she thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there is a reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers the innumerable questions which we ask as we stand outside on the pavement looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way about among these vast depositories of facts, to make up the lives of men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets, are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelists can surpass. Captain Scott, starving and freezing to death in the snow, affects us as deeply as any made-up story of adventure by Conrad or Defoe; but it affects us differently. The biography differs from the novel. To ask a biographer to give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from a novelist is to misuse and misread him. Directly he says “John Jones was born at five-thirty in the morning of August 13, I 862,” he has committed himself, focussed his lens upon fact, and if he then begins to romance, the perspective becomes blurred, we grow suspicious, and our faith in his integrity as a writer is destroyed. In the same way fact destroys fiction. If Thackeray, for example, had quoted an actual newspaper account of the Battle of Waterloo in “Vanity Fair,” the whole fabric of his story would have been destroyed, as a stone destroys a bubble.

But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination. The work of building up a life for oneself from skulls, thimbles, scissors, and sonnets stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

It is necessary to have in hand an immense reserve of imaginative energy in order to attack the steeps of poetry. Here are none of those gradual introductions, those resemblances to the familiar world of daily life with which the novelist entices us into his world of imagination. All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our own minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is a necessity. The sight of a crocus in a garden will suddenly bring to mind all the spring days that have ever been. One then desires the general, not the particular; the whole, not the detail; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not this particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are then more expressive than plain statements.

Thus in order to read poetry rightly, one must be in a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind in which many of the supports and comforts of literature are done without. Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favor of its extremities and extravagances. The representation is often at a very far remove from the thing represented, so that we have to use all our energies of mind to grasp the relation between, for example, the song of a nightingale and the image and ideas which that song stirs in the mind. Thus reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme and metre and sound stir the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and ethereal as some of Keats’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. But it is useless to labor the matter in cold blood. Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity. But such reading is attended, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the utmost stretch and vigilance of the faculties, of the reason no less than of the imagination. We are always verifying the poet’s statements, making a flying comparison, to the best of our powers, between the beauty he makes outside and the beauty we are aware of within. For the humblest among us is endowed with the power of comparison. The simplest (provided he loves reading) has that already within him to which he makes what is given him—by poet or novelist—correspond.

With that saying, of course, the cat is out of the bag. For this admission that we can compare, discriminate, brings us to this further point. Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticizing and judging. Hitherto our endeavor has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathize. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this is no mere figure of speech. The mind seems (“seems,” for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading, when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interruptions. New impressions are always completing or cancelling the old. One’s judgment is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest, succeed each other in such quick succession that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit—to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it becomes a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different, and gives one a different emotion, from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process—the after reading—is finished, and we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.

But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions—is it good, or is it bad?—how good is it, how bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics abound; criticisms pullulate; but minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail, and nothing is more disastrous than to crush one’s own foot into another person’s shoe. When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind—the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read “Clarissa Harlowe,” for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of “Anna Karenina.” At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson’s qualities—his verbosity, his obliqueness—are contrasted with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this. And it is now, when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated independently our own judgment, that we can most profitably help ourselves to the judgments of the great critics—Dryden, Johnson, and the rest. It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we get most from theirs.

So, then—to sum up the different points we have reached in this essay—have we found any answer to our question, how should we read a book? Clearly, no answer that will do for everyone; but perhaps a few suggestions. In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people. This is an outline which can be filled, in at taste and at leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

The Shapes of Grief

Writing in pictures, garth greenwell, you might also like, september twilight, the tolstoyans, thirty clocks strike the hour, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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6 smart steps to effectively read an essay

Whether you’re tackling a dense academic article, a book chapter, or a research paper, this guide will help you navigate the process.

We’ll cover how to dissect an essay step by step, engage critically with its content, and retain the key information that matters most.

By the end, you’ll feel more confident in your ability to handle any essay that comes your way!

Table of Contents

Step 1: Start with the title

Before diving into the essay, the title can offer valuable clues about what lies ahead. Here’s how to make the most of it:

What does the title reveal? Reflect on the title to form a preliminary idea of the essay’s subject matter.

Example: If the title is “The Evolution of Human Rights,” expect the essay to cover historical changes in human rights policies.

What do you already know? Build on your existing knowledge to create a framework for the new information.

Example: If you’re familiar with modern human rights movements, anticipate learning more about earlier developments.

What are your expectations? Based on the title, predict what the author might argue or explain.

Step 2: Understand the context

Knowing when the essay was written and its historical background can change how you interpret the content.

Historical significance Reflect on the time period during which the essay was written. Was it during a key historical moment or cultural shift?

Example: An essay written during the Cold War might emphasize different global dynamics than one written in the 21st century.

What’s the state of research? Essays reflect the state of knowledge at the time. Compare this essay’s claims with current research to understand if it’s outdated or still relevant.
Expect changes over time Predict how the essay might fit into its historical framework.

For example, older essays on psychology might differ from modern interpretations.

Table: Comparing Time Frames

Period	Possible Focus	Considerations
Pre-1900s	Foundational theories	Heavy focus on philosophical or religious views
1900-1950	Industrialization impacts	Socio-economic influences; scientific growth
Post-1950s	Modern science & politics	Political tensions (e.g., Cold War, civil rights)
2000-present	Globalized perspectives	Interconnected global issues, digital revolution

Step 3: Evaluate the author

Knowing the author’s background, credentials, and biases can help you assess the credibility and objectivity of the essay.

Who is the author? Research their credentials, such as educational background or professional affiliations.
Biases and affiliations Consider whether the author’s background introduces any bias or particular perspective.
Author’s body of work If you’re familiar with their other writings, how does this essay fit into their broader perspectives? Do they argue for similar points consistently?

Step 4: Engage actively with the text

While reading, it’s essential to interact with the essay actively. This helps in retaining information and clarifying complex arguments.

Marking key information: As you read, it’s important to highlight or underline sections that introduce new concepts, arguments, or evidence. This helps you quickly locate these sections later when you revisit the essay.

What to highlight: Focus on marking central ideas, definitions, critical arguments, and essential evidence. Pay attention to phrases that indicate a shift in the argument or introduction of a new point.
How to highlight effectively: Use different colors or symbols for different types of information.

For example:

Yellow for key arguments or theses
Blue for supporting evidence
Green for examples or data

Pay attention to the thesis: Every essay has a central argument or thesis that the author attempts to prove or support. This is the core around which the essay’s structure revolves. Identifying the thesis early in your reading helps focus your attention on how the author develops their argument.

Locate the thesis: It is usually found in the introduction or the beginning of a section, and often summarized in a concluding paragraph.
Assess the thesis: Once you find it, consider whether the thesis is clearly stated and supported. Does the author provide enough evidence? Is the thesis arguable or merely a statement of fact?

Example: If the thesis states, “Global warming is accelerated by human industrial activity,” the body of the essay should provide data, case studies, or expert opinions to support this claim. Pay attention to how well these points reinforce the thesis.

Identify supporting evidence: Every strong thesis must be backed by solid evidence. As you read, identify the types of evidence the author uses to support their claims.

Types of evidence: Evidence can come in many forms, such as:

Data from scientific studies
Statistics or figures
Historical examples
Quotations from experts
Case studies
Personal anecdotes (though these are less reliable in academic contexts)

Understanding the source of the evidence is essential in evaluating its reliability. Is the evidence drawn from reputable sources? Does it align with other research you’ve encountered on the topic?

Table: Types of evidence and their reliability

Evidence Type	Example	Reliability Level
Scientific data	Lab results, experimental data	High
Historical examples	Events from the past, documented occurrences	Moderate to high
Expert opinions	Quoted scholars or professionals	High
Personal anecdotes	Author’s own experience	Low

Step 5: Retain essential details

While reading, note down facts, descriptions, or any source citations you may want to reference later.

Track key facts: Maintain a list of important details, especially if they may serve your research or learning objectives.

Why it’s important: Keeping track of important facts helps consolidate your understanding of the essay’s content and ensures you don’t overlook essential details when you revisit it later.
What to track: Focus on key elements that stand out due to their relevance to the essay’s thesis, such as historical events, scientific findings, or significant quotes.

Mark sources: If the author cites important sources, record them for future use, particularly for research or academic purposes.

Why mark sources? Citing credible sources enhances your research and lets you explore topics in greater depth. Well-cited essays often reference key studies or authoritative authors crucial for deeper understanding.
How to mark sources effectively: As you read, list relevant citations in a notes document or use tools like Zotero or EndNote to organize them.

Tip: Create a separate bibliography document as you read, so you don’t have to go back later.

Step 6: Reflect on your learning

Reflecting on an essay helps consolidate what you’ve learned and develop your personal insights. It also highlights areas for further exploration.

What did you learn?

Summarizing the main points in your own words helps reinforce retention and ensures that you truly grasp the concepts. This step clarifies the author’s argument and allows you to internalize key ideas.

Tip: Try to restate the essay’s thesis and main arguments without looking back at the text. This tests your comprehension and strengthens memory.

Example: If the essay discusses climate change policies, summarize what the author believes are the most effective strategies for reducing carbon emissions.

How does it relate to what you already know?

Reflect on how the essay’s content fits into your existing knowledge base. Consider whether the new information aligns with or challenges what you previously understood.

Confirm or challenge? Did the essay reinforce your existing beliefs or introduce perspectives that made you rethink the topic?

Add depth: Perhaps the essay provided more detailed evidence or a different angle on something you already knew. This deepens your knowledge and might even inspire further reading.

Did the argument convince you?

Think critically about whether the author made a persuasive case. Even if you weren’t fully convinced by the argument, the supporting data or evidence might still be useful.

Evaluate the argument: Was the thesis well-supported? Were any key counterarguments ignored?

Example: An essay could advocate for a controversial viewpoint, like limiting free speech, but the data on social media’s impact on public discourse could still be valuable for other research projects.

Can you identify any contradictions or gaps?

Look for areas where the author may have left key points unaddressed or where contradictions appear in the argument. These gaps can open opportunities for further study or research on the topic.

Contradictions: Did the author make claims that conflict with each other?

Missed counterpoints: Were alternative perspectives ignored or not fully explored? These areas could provide fertile ground for your own essays or research.

Approaching an essay with intention and strategy enhances comprehension and ensures that your reading time is more productive.

By grasping the author’s purpose, evaluating the evidence, and reflecting on the content, you can turn any essay into a powerful learning experience.

Additionally, creating a summary sheet with key takeaways and notes can significantly aid in retaining information for future reference.

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Student Essays

Essay on Book Reading – Value & Importance For Students

Book reading is very important. It is in fact a meaningful and most valuable activity one should do. The books are the best friends. Books are the treasure house of knowledge and wisdom. It is therefore, very imperative, for young old, for children & students, to read books and enhance knowledge. Read following short & long essay on topic Essay on Book reading, value and importance of book reading with quotes & images for Ukg children & students.

Essay on Book Reading | Value & Importance of Book Reading, Books are best Friends – Short & Long Essay For Students

Introduction

Book reading is very good habit. It has very positive effects on person. Book reading plays a major role in developing of personality. It build’s one character.

Book reading is one of the best hobbies of the world. It has wide importance and a lot of benefits in one’s life. It takes you to another world. Book reading is the best investment of time. They are the treasure house of knowledge and wisdom. One can enjoy a lot by reading books of his interest. Books are best way to gain valuable knowledge.

Importance & Advantages of Book Reading

Book reading is has a lot of benefits. It enhances our knowledge and we can get massive knowledge just by reading a book. It plays a major role in improving language skills.

One can learn new words by reading books. It also makes you write well. We read about different personalities and stories of their valor and strength in books.

>> Related: A Good Paragraph on Value of Books For Students <<<<

These stories motivate us to do best in our lives. We learn a lot from lives of these wit people who have served humanity by their sound abilities. The biographies of great ones make us to work hard and keep working till achievement of success. Books take you to new world. We can read about different people and different places in books. It gives us glimpse of different places of world. One has rightly said

[su_quote]“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel with out moving your feet.”[/su_quote]

Books give you right direction to lead your life. We read about different philosophies about life and this gives us better understanding of life. We start to comprehend life and it purpose. Books are the best motivator of life and best assistant for life. They tell you that lives of all the great ones were full of troubles and tribulations.

It is important face all the problems manfully and does not lose hope. One can also know about his interest by reading books. This makes us to choose the career which is according to our deposition and aptitude.

Books are the Best Friends & Best Investment of Time

Book reading is the best investment of time in all ways. There are books for all age groups. One can read stories, biographies, novels, philosophies, religious books etc. we can read books according to our interest.

One can read historical books and can easily know about the lives of ancient people and their ways of living. Books take you every corner of world as we can read the books of different writers from different areas. It gives us chance to know about thoughts of people of different areas.

We can travel of different corners of world. Books widen our imaginations by reading about diverse topics. It enables us to think beyond the limits. Books help us to build our character and lead our life in a better way.

Books are permanent companions. Knowledge we get through books help us in many ways. Books are source of solace for all the people and they find themselves very comfortable in company of books. It makes them forget their worries and engross in the words of writer. Above all, book reading hobby is indeed on of the finest investment of time

Book reading has major influence on the thoughts of man. Thus, it is very important to choose good books for reading. We should choose books that enhance our knowledge and give our life a better direction. It is very important to develop the habit of book reading.

Children should be encouraged by their teachers and parents for reading books. Government should build libraries to develop the interest of people towards books by providing them valuable books. Book reading can change the life of people in positive way.

2 thoughts on “Essay on Book Reading – Value & Importance For Students”

Its very good .

plz write essay on Book Reading and its Impacts on Readers’ Personality … BTW nice essay.

Essay on Books and Reading | Books and Reading Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by sastry

Essay on Books And Reading: “Truly, each new book is as a ship that bears us away from the fixity of our limitations into the movement and splendors of life’s infinite ocean”.

Above fines were said by Helen Keller. Who does not know about her? She was deaf-blind yet she went on to become a powerful advocate for disability rights, women’s suffrage and racial equality.

You can read more Essay Writing about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Short Essay on Books and Reading 200 Words in English

Below we have given a short essay on Books and Reading is for Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. This short essay on the topic is suitable for students of class 6 and below.

As far as books are concerned, one should follow Bacon’s advice, “Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested”.

Happy is the man who acquires the habit of reading , when he is young. He has achieved and secured a life-long source of pleasure, instruction and inspiration. Such a man is never isolated and does not crave for company. His wealth of books is more precious than gold. Ruskin calls books ‘king’s treasures.

The blessings of books conferred upon the person who possesses them are uncountable with only one warning that the books read should be worth reading. It will be correct to say that a dose of poison can do its work only once, but a bad book can go on poisoning people’s fives for generations to come.

Reading gives the highest kind of pleasure. Some book we simply read for pleasure and amusement. For example, good novels. Novels and books of imagination must have their place in every body’s reading.

When we are tired, it is a healthy recreation to indulge in light reading, as that makes our fatigue vanish, but we have to take care to cultivate the habit of reading books on history, literature, geography, science, philosophy, religion etc. The pleasure got from reading and enjoying such books will be more solid and instructive. Books ar

e standing counsellors and preachers, always at hand and always neutral.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods, without words or anger, without asking for money. If you seek them, they do not hide, if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not make fun of you.

Books are the most faithful of friends. Our friends may change, may quarrel or turn deceitful but not books. They always stand by you and are always patiently waiting to talk to us. They are never cross, peevish or unwilling to talk, as our friends in life sometimes are.

The books that help us most are those that make us think. Books are the best of things if well used, if abused are the worst: No book can be good, if studied negligently.

Reading them is a joy in itself and its benefits cannot be described in words. It is a task, which you have to perform and perform wholeheartedly. Thus, the joys, inspiration and instructions received will be boundless and far exceeding your imagination.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2022

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, zora neale hurston, jhumpa lahiri, melissa febos, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

3. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

4. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it …

Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

5. You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a dazzling collection of her work … You Don’t Know Us Negroes reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter … Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous … Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class … But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial …

Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time … Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast.”

–Lisa Page ( The Washington Post )

6. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“… written with an astonishing amount of attention and care … Aviv’s triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting. Chief among these is her empathy, which never gives way to pity or sentimentality. She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists’ accounts of their patients’ troubles. Though deeply curious about each subject, Aviv doesn’t treat them as anomalous or strange … Aviv’s daunted respect for uncertainty is what makes Strangers to Ourselves distinctive. She is hyperaware of just how sensitive the scale of the self can be.”

–Charlotte Shane ( Bookforum )

7. A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Line in the World here

“Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark … The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks—and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth … People aren’t wholly incidental to the narrative. Nors introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, and shares vivid memories of her family’s time in a cabin on the coast south of Thyborøn. But in a way that recalls the work of Barry Lopez, nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

8. Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen (Viking)

4 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Raising Raffi here

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene … Is it OK to out your kid like this? … Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was … Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature … He is just as good on parenting manuals … Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations … Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs … Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers … It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer…who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

9. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (Doubleday)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan Watch an interview with CJ Hauser here

“17 brilliant pieces … This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection … Calling Hauser ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur … It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky … this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery … Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.”

–Hope Reese ( Oprah Daily )

10. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from How to Read Now here

“Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called ‘Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.’ The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it … How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish … How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas …

So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers…and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation … A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity—a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.”

–Zan Romanoff ( The Los Angeles Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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English Compositions

Essay on My Hobby Reading Book [With PDF]

Book reading is one of the most prevalent hobbies among children. That’s why this topic has a certain reputation to come in as an essay writing topic in various types of examinations. But I have noticed that students of different classes face a few issues while writing essays on this very topic. Therefore I have decided to come up with a session explaining the very method of writing an essay on my hobby reading book most specifically for the students from class 6 to 9.

Essay on My Hobby Reading Book within 100 Words

My Hobby Reading Book

All my school friends have chosen something as their hobby while promoted to high school from the primary standard. I also chose book reading as my hobby. I love to read different kinds of books since my early childhood. I still remember that my mother used to tell me stories at night when I was a child.

Probably my passion for reading storybooks got developed from that time. I prefer reading detective as well as ghost stories. One of my teachers has asked me to read travel stories by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. I have read the book Chander Pahar written by him. The character Shankar from the novel Chander Pahar has become very close to my heart.

Essay on My Hobby Reading Book within 200 Words

My Hobby Reading Book

Everybody in their life pursues something as a hobby. A hobby is something that any person is passionate about. People spend their leisure time pursuing a hobby. Like other people, I have chosen reading books as my hobby. This hobby of mine is not about reading regular academic books. Rather I love to read books on different topics and incidents happening all around the world.

Especially, I love to read books on real travel stories as well as adventures. My habit of reading books developed since I was a child. We had no television or mobile phone in our house but a lot of books. I used to read from them whatever I wanted to. Most of those I hardly understood. I still remember those days when my father used to buy me monthly child magazines like Anandamela and Suktara.

I still love reading comics from those magazines. My favorite comics are Tintin, Chacha Chowdhury as well as Nonte-Fonte. I have recently read a book named Aranyak written by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. It is all about the life experience of the author in a remote rural location of India. In this book, the description of nature is so vivid that any passionate reader will get lost in an amazing experience. All my teachers as well as my parents appreciate this hobby.

Essay on My Hobby Reading Book within 300 Words

A hobby is something that a person pursues to take a break from the same monotonous regular routine. That’s why everyone chooses something as a hobby that they love. Because as wise men say that love can be the ultimate motivation to do something.

So, we all need to choose something as our hobby that we are passionate about. Without passion, all our efforts to do something creative go into the vein. Our hobbies necessarily can enrich us both physically and mentally. That’s why my father says that hobbies are needed to be chosen wisely and very carefully for proper utilization of both time and effort.

Hobbies can be of many different types. Many of my classmates have chosen singing, gardening, painting as their hobbies. My best friend Piyush chose stamps collection as his hobby. These all hobbies bring refreshment to them. Like my friends, I have also chosen reading books as my hobby. I enjoy my hobby the most.

I love to read about everything no matter what topic it is. Since my early childhood, I developed a passion for reading. My parents used to gift me so many books since then. Every year, I go to the Kolkata International Book Fair with my parents. Moreover, After getting promoted to high school from primary, I got exclusive student access to my school library.

Nowadays, I borrow more books from the library than buying them. Not only the school library but my father has also helped me to get a membership of the district library Khardah.

I love reading all kinds of books. But especially I am passionate about reading historical fiction. For this reason, Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay is one of my most favorite writers. Besides these, I also love to read adventure fiction as well as mythologies.

Essay on My Hobby Reading Book within 500 Words

What is a hobby? What a person should choose as a hobby? Before going deep into the discussion of my hobby, let’s talk about the hobby itself. A hobby is something that people do especially in their leisure time mostly for enjoyment. We do not expect to get paid for our hobbies.

These are some habits that come from inside us due to our natural internal tendency as well as passion. Hobbies include a wide range of activities. It can be collecting something like coins or stamps or leaves, fine arts activities like painting, dancing, Creative works like gardening, writing poetry, etc. Or it can simply be reading books, like what I have chosen as my hobby of life.

At the very beginning, I want to say that I literally admire my hobby, and one of my playschool teachers inspired me to fall in love with reading books when I was at my very early age. I still remember she used to bring me many kinds of colorful interesting books full of amazing stories as well as pictures.

At that age, I fond of those kinds of books. Later on, I came to know that those books are known as comics. I have read so many comics since my early childhood. Tintin, Phantom, Dennis the Menace, Hada Bhoda, Nonte-Phonte is a few among them. My parents always appreciate my hobby of reading books. For me, reading any book is the way of my utmost relaxation.

When I get tremendously bored of my regular monotonous life, at that point my storybooks help me to travel in some dream location being a part of some exciting adventure of imagination. After going to high school, I got exclusive access to my school’s students’ library and a different world opened there for me. From then, I borrow books so many kinds of books from my school library and read them thoroughly.

Here, I would like to mention my school librarian sir Mr. Paresh Pathak who helps me to choose the proper book according to my age and reading tendency. From my school library, I have read many works of great authors like Guru Rabindranath Tagore, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and many more.

Recently, I have developed a special interest in magic realism. Very recently, I was reading a work of the great Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The name of the book is very famous One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is an amazing work that led me to a different fantasy world along with the dark humorous touch of eternal truth.

I’ve also read some works of Franz Kafka. His famous work The Metamorphosis will be very close to my heart always. For these also all credit goes my school librarian sir. He first suggested me to read something unconventional out of the box.

I got the first book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from him. Moreover, I learned about magic realism from him as well. I believe that no matter what happens with human beings, but books, stories, and realization are eternal. They will never abandon me in my entire life.

That was all about essay writing on my hobby reading books. Here in the session, I have tried to write some essays on the very topic following every method and all possible perspectives. Moreover, I have also tried to write them for students of different classes. Besides, I maintained the word limit relevant for various examinations.

Hope you found this session helpful as per your requirement. Let us know your valuable opinion as well as suggestions for this session in the comment section below. Thank you; see you again very soon.

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Not-so-great expectations: Students are reading fewer books in English class

Chris Stanislawski, 14, poses for a portrait outside of his home in Garden City, N.Y., on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024. Chris didn’t finish any books in his 8th grade English class, in part because their google classroom had detailed summaries of each chapter of every book. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)

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Chris Stanislawski didn’t read much in his middle school English classes, but it never felt necessary. Students were given detailed chapter summaries for every novel they discussed, and teachers played audio of the books during class.

Much of the reading material at Garden City Middle School in Long Island was either abridged books, or online texts and printouts, he said.

“When you’re given a summary of the book telling you what you’re about to read in baby form, it kind of just ruins the whole story for you,” said Chris, 14. “Like, what’s the point of actually reading?”

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans , pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.

The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged the shift in a 2022 statement on media education, saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”

The idea is not to remove books but to teach media literacy and add other texts that feel relevant to students, said Seth French, one of the statement’s co-authors. In the English class he taught before becoming a dean last year at Bentonville High School in Arkansas, students engaged with plays, poetry and articles but read just one book together as a class.

“At the end of the day, a lot of our students are not interested in some of these texts that they didn’t have a choice in,” he said.

The emphasis on shorter, digital texts does not sit well with everyone.

Deep reading is essential to strengthen circuits in the brain tied to critical thinking skills, background knowledge — and, most of all, empathy, said Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA specializing in dyslexia research.

“We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

At Garden City Middle School, students are required to read several books in their entirety each year, including “Of Mice and Men” and “Romeo and Juliet,” Principal Matthew Samuelson said. Audio versions and summaries are provided as extra resources, he said.

For Chris, who has dyslexia, the audio didn’t make the reading feel more accessible. He just felt bored. He switched this fall to a Catholic school, which his mother feels will prepare him better for college.

Even outside school, students are reading less

There’s little data on how many books are assigned by schools. But in general, students are reading less. Federal data from last year shows only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012.

Teachers say the slide has its roots in the COVID-19 crisis.

“There was a trend, it happened when COVID hit, to stop reading full-length novels because students were in trauma; we were in a pandemic. The problem is we haven’t quite come back from that,” said Kristy Acevedo, who teaches English at a vocational high school in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

This year, she said she won’t accept that students are too distracted to read. She plans to teach time-management strategies and to use only paper and pencils for most of class time.

Other teachers say the trend stems from standardized testing and the influence of education technology . Digital platforms can deliver a complete English curriculum, with thousands of short passages aligned to state standards — all without having to assign an actual book.

“If admins and school districts are judged by their test scores, how are they going to improve their test scores? They’re going to mirror the test as much as possible,” said Karl Ubelhoer, a middle school special education teacher in Tabernacle, New Jersey.

For some students, it’s a struggle to read at all . Only around a third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, down significantly from 2019.

Leah van Belle, executive director of the Detroit literacy coalition 313Reads, said when her son read “Peter Pan” in late elementary school, it was too hard for most kids in the class. She laments that Detroit feels like “a book desert.” Her son’s school doesn’t even have a library.

Still, she said it makes sense for English classes to focus on shorter texts.

“As an adult, if I want to learn about a topic and research it, be it personal or professional, I’m using interactive digital text to do that,” she said.

Teachers fit books in with other ‘spinning plates’

Even in well-resourced schools, one thing is always in short supply: time.

Terri White, a teacher at South Windsor High School in Connecticut, no longer makes her honors ninth-grade English class read all of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She assigns about a third of the book and a synopsis of the rest. They have to move on quickly because of pressure for teachers to cram more into the curriculum, she said.

“It’s like spinning plates, you know what I mean? Like it’s a circus,” she said.

She also assigns less homework because kids’ schedules are so packed with sports, clubs and other activities.

“I maintain rigor. But I’m more about helping students become stronger and more critical readers, writers and thinkers, while taking their social-emotional well-being into account,” she said.

In the long run, the synopsis approach harms students’ critical thinking skills, said Alden Jones, a literature professor at Emerson College in Boston. She assigns fewer books than she once did and gives more quizzes to make sure students do the reading.

“We don’t value the thinking time that we used to have. It’s all time we could be on our phone accomplishing tasks,” she said.

Will Higgins, an English teacher at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts, said he still believes in teaching the classics, but demands on students’ time have made it necessary to cut back.

“We haven’t given up on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ We haven’t given up on ‘Hamlet’ or ‘The Great Gatsby,’″ Higgins said. But he said they have given up assigning others like “A Tale of Two Cities.”

His school has had success encouraging reading through student-directed book clubs, where small groups pick a book and discuss it together. Contemporary authors like John Green and Jason Reynolds have been a big hit.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Many students are saying that it’s the first time in a long time they’ve read a full book .”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Essay on My Favourite Book for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on My Favourite Book

Essay on My Favourite Book: Books are friends who never leave your side. I find this saying to be very true as books have always been there for me. I enjoy reading books . They have the power to help us travel through worlds without moving from our places. In addition, books also enhance our imagination. Growing up, my parents and teachers always encouraged me to read. They taught me the importance of reading. Subsequently, I have read several books. However, one boom that will always be my favourite is Harry Potter. It is one of the most intriguing reads of my life. I have read all the books of this series, yet I read them again as I never get bored of it.

Harry Potter Series

Harry Potter was a series of books authored by one of the most eminent writers of our generation, J.K. Rowling. These books showcase the wizarding world and its workings. J.K. Rowling has been so successful at weaving a picture of this world, that it feels real. Although the series contains seven books, I have a particular favourite. My favourite book from the series is The Goblet of fire.

When I started reading the book, it caught my attention instantly. Even though I had read all the previous parts, none of the books caught my attention as this one did. It gave a larger perspective into the wizarding world. One of the things which excite me the most about this book is the introduction of the other wizard schools. The concept of the Tri-wizard tournament is one of the most brilliant pieces I have come across in the Harry Potter series.

In addition, this book also contains some of my favourite characters. The moment I read about Victor Krum’s entry, I was star struck. The aura and personality of that character described by Rowling are simply brilliant. Further, it made me become a greater fan of the series.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

What Harry Potter Series Taught Me?

Even though the books are about the world of wizards and magic, the Harry Potter series contains a lot of lessons for young people to learn. Firstly, it teaches us the importance of friendship. I have read many books but never come across a friendship like that of Harry, Hermoine, and Ron. These three musketeers stuck together throughout the books and never gave up. It taught me the value of a good friend.

Further, the series of Harry Potter taught me that no one is perfect. Everyone has good and evil inside them. We are the ones who choose what we wish to be. This helped me in making better choices and becoming a better human being. We see how the most flawed characters like Snape had goodness inside them. Similarly, how the nicest ones like Dumbledore had some bad traits. This changed my perspective towards people and made me more considerate.

Finally, these books gave me hope. They taught me the meaning of hope and how there is light at the end of the tunnel. It gave me the strength to cling on to hope in the most desperate times just like Harry did all his life. These are some of the most essential things I learned from Harry Potter.

In conclusion, while there were many movies made in the books. Nothing beats the essence and originality of the books. The details and inclusiveness of books cannot be replaced by any form of media. Therefore, the Goblet of Fire remains to be my favourite book.

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Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers Department

ISBN: 978-1-394-23860-6

August 2024

Wiley-Blackwell

Digital Evaluation Copy

Catherine M. Robb , Georgie Mills , William Irwin

Explore the philosophical wisdom of Taylor Swift and her music

Taylor Swift is a “Mastermind” when it comes to relationships, songwriting, and performing sold-out stadium tours. But did you know that Taylor is also a philosophical mastermind?

Taylor Swift and Philosophy is the first book to explore the philosophical topics that arise from Taylor Swift's life and music. Edited and authored by Swifties who also happen to be philosophers and scholars, this fun and engaging book is written with general readers in mind—you don't have to be a devoted fan or a specialist in philosophy to explore the themes, concepts, and questions expressed in Taylor's songs.

Is Taylor Swift a philosopher?
What can her songs tell us about ethics and society?
What is the nature of friendship?
Should you forgive someone for breaking your heart?

Presenting top-tier research and new perspectives on important contemporary issues, twenty-seven chapters discuss the philosophical contexts of Taylor's work, such as the ethics of reputational damage, the impacts of first impressions, the moral obligation to speak out against injustice, and much more.

Taylor Swift and Philosophy is a must-read for Swifties who want to deepen their appreciation and understanding of Taylor's work, as well as for philosophy students and scholars with an interest in popular culture and media studies.

CATHERINE M. ROBB is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University, Netherlands. Her research interests include ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and applied philosophy, with a focus on the nature and value of ability, skill and talent, and related ethical implications.

GEORGIE MILLS is a Research Fellow at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. She is primarily a philosopher of science, emotion, and medicine with a range of interests in the philosophy of pop culture. She has published work on Punk, Post-Punk, Britney Spears, and Ted Lasso .

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JD Vance Just Decried Political Violence. But He Endorsed a Book Celebrating It.

The book champions the violent regimes of right-wing dictators like francisco franco, while defining people on the left as “unhuman.”.

Noah Lanard

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Mike Stewart/AP

On Monday, JD Vance wrote a more than 1,200 word post on X in response to a second apparent assassination attempt targeting Donald. In it, Vance said the “threat of violence is disgraceful,” called on people to “reject political violence,” and said he admired President Joe Biden for “calling for peace and calm.”

Vance’s rejection of political violence would be more persuasive had he not recently endorsed a book that celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and coauthor Joshua Lisec, a professional ghostwriter, was published in July with a forward by Steve Bannon. As my colleague David Corn reported in July, Vance wrote a blurb used to promote the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans , Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Even by today’s standards, Unhumans is extreme , transparently authoritarian, and evocative of Nazi propaganda in its insistence on the complete dehumanization of political opponents. The thesis of the book is that the right is up against “unhumans” intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists, leftists, and so-called progressives. In summarizing their argument, they write:

This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.

Vance and Posobiec appear to be close. During a speech in March to the hard-right group American Moment, the Ohio senator began began by shouting out “good friends” in the audience like fellow Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters and “Jack P,” an apparent reference to Posobiec, who was in the audience that night. Vance’s blurb appeared a few months later.

But it is really in their account of 20th century politics that the full extent of their revisionism comes into view. A section dealing with the Spanish Civil war comes with the subhead: “Fransciso Franco, a Great Man of History.”

“Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator,” the authors claim, “the eventual [sic] victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo , or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.” This will come as news to the Spaniards whose ancestors’ remains are still being identified in mass graves that Franco was responsible for.

As I read their paeon to Franco, who took power as a result of a military coup, I remembered Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild’s book on Americans who fought against Franco, Spain in Our Hearts . In it, Hochschild describes how Franco’s troops boasted about having Moorish soldiers rape Spanish women who opposed them. Franco’s Nationalist troops, he writes, celebrated raping perceived enemies by scrawling on walls: “Your women will give birth to Fascists.” Hochschild continues:

Beyond the rapes, in town after town, women whose only crime was to be supporters of Popular Front parties had their heads shaved. In a practice borrowed from Italian Fascists, they were then forcefed castor oil (a powerful laxative) and paraded through the streets, sometimes naked or half naked, to be jeered as they soiled themselves.

Posobiec and Lisec take a different view of Franco. They suggest that the Spanish civil war is rarely described as what it is: “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross—that is, for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.”

Elsewhere in the book, Posobiec and Lisec celebrate Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup that deposed Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. One of the defining atrocities of Pinochet’s dictatorship were the “ death flights ” in which political dissidents were killed and forcibly disappeared after being dropped from the air into the ocean or mountains. Posobiec and Lisec write that the “story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism.” They continue approvingly, “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Other subjects of the author’s adulation include Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joseph McCarthy. In closing, they argue that “Great Men of Means,” which they effectively define as dictators, are one of the best ways to crush their subhuman opponents. Supporting such a strongman is depicted as all but the opportunity of a lifetime. “You’ll know them when you see them,” the authors explain, “as they attract all the literal and metaphorical firepower of the enemy.”

Vance may abhor some political violence. But his endorsement of Unhumans raises questions about how he feels about the kind directed at his political enemies.

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JD Vance Thinks He Can Sell His Nativism With Cat Memes

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Svetlana Alpers’s New Book Asks: Is Art History?

By Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky

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Report Finds Art Sales Stagnate, Even as the Luxury Sector Continues to Grow

A large stone cathedral against a blue sky with clouds.

Tehran Museum Loses 30 Paintings it Loaned Out, Identity of Mysterious Man Buried Under Notre-Dame Revealed, and More: Morning Links for September 18, 2024

And then, as she writes most bluntly about Shirley Jaffe (though similar feelings arise recurrently throughout these essays), “her images are there not for words, but for seeing.” Words, including those of artists themselves—as prolix in their way as critics, curators, and historians—can serve vision but can also deflect from it. Alpers returns incessantly to the misfit between visual art and the words with which we attempt to channel and articulate the experience it offers, between (to continue De Dominicis’s metaphor) the impact of the collision and the cry of that occasion. A poignant detail from her essay on Jaffe’s colorful abstract paintings: “she turned to art because she was ashamed of her father’s accent: art for her was an alternative to language.” Jaffe’s paintings are, as Alpers writes, “word-free.” But my feeling is that they are filiated with those of Stuart Davis, and that it is specifically the words that Davis loved to incorporate into his painting, proto-Pop, of which Jaffe’s are free: words like champion, new, else/used to be/now. While Alpers explains and supports Jaffe’s assertion that her art has more in common with Picasso than Matisse, to whom she is often compared, I wish she had explored Jaffe’s more direct affinity with Davis, her most immediate American precursor.

ALPERS’S BOOK GATHERS a long lifetime’s product of a penetrating eye and mind. I assume it has been produced mainly for the use of (and as a challenge to) her fellow art historians. But I am here to tell you, as someone who is not a member of that guild, that her words offer pleasure and instruction to anyone who cares about art, and above all to make them wonder whether their ideas about it can be usefully reexamined. The texts range in date from an examination of Vasari’s ekphrases produced for E.H. Gombrich’s Harvard graduate seminar in 1959 and published the following year in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes to a brief contribution to the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023 exhibition on Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja. A few of the pieces have not previously been published, while others were produced for relatively obscure or hard-to-find publications (like a series of book reviews for the magazine published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society).

Alpers’s first Harvard seminar paper already evidences her originality of mind, and, in retrospect, her tenacity as well. She suggests that Vasari, the originator of European art history, can be read differently than had been the case. Why are his descriptions of paintings so consistent in form, whether they relate to Giotto (at the beginning of art’s development, as Vasari saw it) or Leonardo (near the culmination of that development with Michelangelo and Raphael)? Why don’t his ekphrases bear out his ideas about the path toward perfection?

Alpers’s solution is to say that Vasari distinguishes between technique and expression in art as between means and end. What’s to be expressed—the story and the emotions it arouses—remains constant. It is the technique, the means, that have been perfected, not the narrative emotion to be conveyed: “Giotto tells a story as well as Leonardo,” Alpers writes, “although the means have changed.” Thus, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists presents “imitation as the perfectible means and narration as the constant end of art.”

This idea has consequences that I cannot go into here. What’s impressive is the young historian’s willingness to shrewdly reread the most widely read art historical source against the grain of her elders’ understanding. And in distinguishing between narrative and representational aspects of art, Alpers is embarking on her examination of a problem that would preoccupy her for two decades: art historians’ inability to incorporate Dutch art into a historical model based on the Italian emphasis on narrative, and on the texts that supply art’s underlying narrative.

That line of inquiry, whose true culmination would be Alpers’s groundbreaking second book, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), is best represented here by her 1976 essay “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation.” But it’s notable that among Dutch painters, Alpers is most interested in the three great exceptions who share the least in their countrymen’s faith in description: Bruegel, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. To the Dutch belief that art can offer a “certain grasp” on things, Alpers writes, “Vermeer responds with a deep uncertainty.” (That observation put me in mind of something a painter from the former West Germany told me some 20 years ago, when painters from the former East were becoming popular: “They paint out of what they know about painting. We paint out of what we don’t know.”)

A painting of a woman in a headdress bathed in gorgeous light.

ALPERS IS CONVINCING in her assertion that an art history based on the model she’d inherited from Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, and the other émigrés who created mainstream art history fails to account for Dutch art. But if even Dutch painting turns out to be “an art without history … if the standard is set by the centuries of Italian or French art in the Louvre,” then what are the chances that the arts of other continents, other civilizations than those of Europe will ever be encompassed by a single history or a single discipline? Do the arts of the world become so many isolated silos?

Also: does art even have a history, or is it just that various narrowly defined artistic traditions have their separate histories, despite the fact that we see so many attempts at synthesis in the present? That’s a question Alpers hardly addresses. She has helped dissolve the hold of an old master narrative, but she doesn’t point us toward a new one.

I should not give the impression that Alpers’s interests are limited to the art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, terms I use for convenience despite her reiterated suspicion of the notions of period style that go along with them. (An essay could be devoted to unraveling her reflections on the word style .) Alpers has a special interest in photography—in 2020 she published a book on Walker Evans, who is a recurrent reference point here—that is fulfilled in a beautiful essay on Judith Joy Ross. She is fascinated by the “marvelous and disturbing” work of the overlooked Abstract Expressionist Bradley Walker Tomlin, whose work, she explains, “hung in the New York penthouse apartment of an artist friend of my parents. It is the abstraction I remember, although there were many others hanging there.”

A painting of Jesus presiding over a dinner with lots of drama around him.

She also writes illuminatingly about contemporary artists as different as Tacita Dean, Rebecca Horn, and Alex Katz. Each seems to have been noticed for unrelated reasons, however; no history of the present seems in view here. She has something almost shockingly modest to say in response to a work by Ann Hamilton: “that it is simply surprising. There is no way of judging what its success might consist of artistically or what particular purchase it has on human experience.” I find the frankness of that impressive, precisely because, in her position, I would have felt duty bound to speculate on those things that she admits are imponderable.

Alpers insists that her concern “has always been with making, not with reception. I am not interested in how people take things, but how they make things.” And yet her writing is always imbued with the how and why and what of her own reception of artworks. That reception is what she calls reflexive. “My taste is for description,” she bluntly declares, but she doesn’t pretend to pure objectivity. Maybe it’s just that she is only interested in her own take, not in those of others. And that’s alright. Alpers proclaims herself “a contrary person,” and her contrariety, which she says she shared with her teacher Gombrich, shows its value in allowing her confidence in her own perspective and her ability to clarify her thoughts through writing. One’s own thoughts can seem terribly vague by comparison.

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