I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Interpretation
Reading should be a balanced experience, akin to a nutritious diet, where one selects different styles to enhance understanding.
In this quote, Zadie Smith compares reading to maintaining a balanced diet, suggesting that just as one should be mindful of their nutritional intake, they should also be selective about the type of literature they consume. By contrasting the dense and elaborate style of David Foster Wallace with the more straightforward prose of Franz Kafka, she implies that readers can improve their literary health by diversifying their reading habits and choosing works that provide clarity and nourishment for the mind.
In practice
During the book club meeting, we discussed how to diversify our reading lists for a richer experience.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.
One of the things I'm best at is modeling. I find someone who is best at something I want to learn. Then I model them, and learn it myself. Then, when I've proven it to myself, I teach it to others.
For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.
I studied psychology in school, and the best psychology is in literature. It's so much easier to understand a character than a theory. You can recognize yourself—or other people—in a different way.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
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