Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Interpretation
The books we choose to revisit or abandon reveal our true selves more than those books' inherent value.
This quote suggests that our reading habits reflect our personalities and preferences more than the actual merits of the books we encounter. Rereading certain books indicates a personal connection or understanding, while books we cannot finish may symbolize mismatches with our interests, values, or emotional readiness. In essence, our literary choices tell a story about who we are, illuminating our tastes, thoughts, and life experiences.
In practice
During a book club discussion on personal growth, I shared this quote to emphasize how our reading choices can reflect our inner selves.
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the βnursery,β as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
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