To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.
Interpretation
Reading a novel demands commitment and focus to fully appreciate its narrative.
Philip Roth emphasizes that to truly engage with a novel, one must immerse themselves in it with dedication and concentration. He suggests that if it takes longer than two weeks to read a novel, the reader might not be experiencing it fully, as prolonged distractions can detract from the depth and enjoyment of the storytelling.
In practice
In a book club discussion, highlighting how immersion in reading can enhance understanding of themes.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.
In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.
If someone comes to you with, 'It's my kid's graduation,' you don't tell them, 'Sorry, you can't go to that.' You just don't do that. You figure out some other way.
The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.
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