(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Davies was a Canadian author and professor.
He confessed to having been “a rake at reading” (Davies 1998, 2–3):
I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me—if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time
Even as rakish readers we shouldn’t be content with a steady diet of mediocre books; but neither should we read only the best: to know what a masterpiece is we must occasionally read the substandard to gauge our current age (pp. 215, 233).
We call some books masterpieces because we admit that literature, like music, is art. When we listen to music “our civilization demands that serious and sometimes almost religious attention be paid to it”, but when we read, many of us skip, stop “in improbable places”, and rush through books, just so that we can say we read them (pp. 221–2). Instead, we should put aside time—even just fifteen minutes—in which we read with our full attention (p. 223). During this serious reading time we should only read what we like; putting aside anything that bores us (ibid.). Davies exemplified these principles. He read for most of each day in a windowless office, and did some reading for his book reviews at night; when he was tired of work, he read for pleasure (p. 17). He read an “incoherent mass of books”, “wanderingly, capriciously”, following his nose (p. 26).
Yet he read slowly, ranking “only slightly above those who move their lips and follow the lines with a careful finger” (p. 17). We’re trying to find out what the book has to say, not reach the end in order to read something else, so we should read “somewhat more slowly than modern educationists recommend” (p. 223). Davies describes this pace as that which “you can pronounce and hear every word in your own head” (ibid.). This eloquent verbalisation takes more time, but we diminish our pleasure by trying to save time in this regard, and our pleasure is why we read (ibid.).
Verbalising as we read used to be common and allowed readers to truly absorb and remember what they read (p. 224). It is also a useful critical practice in that when encountering a dubious or false passage, the “trick of argument or the falsity of emphasis will declare itself to your ear, when it seemed to be deceiving your eye” (ibid.). We don’t get the best from our reading unless we recognise and develop our qualities as interpretative artists (pp. 224–5):
You do not play a Bach concerto for the solo cello on a musical saw, and you should not read a play of Shakespeare in the voice of an auctioneer selling tobacco
Pleasure is our purpose so we should read several books at once—the “notion that you have to read solemnly through one book before you can allow yourself to take up another is simple Puritanism” (p. 226). To be an epicurean reader like Davies we should keep on our table “a book of poetry, as well as a novel, some essays, and perhaps a play or two” so that we have to hand what is appropriate to our appetite (ibid.).
As our appetites and personalities change in our maturity, so do our experiences of books. It is a sin to assume that having read something once we have read it forever (p. 228). We should especially aim to read literature at the age the author was when they wrote it, and then reread it periodically to evaluate how their work comports with our life experience (ibid.). Indeed, we should seek awareness of the author’s mind so that we can share it and learn from it (pp. 229–230). We never read the same book twice, and even when we read a book for the first time, we make something fresh of it (pp. 228, 26):
A book is renewed every time it finds a perceptive reader, and no book is the same to every reader
Reading is a reflection of the reader’s spirit, so while we may appear to choose our books, our books also choose us (p. 26):
Reading is not escape, something done at random; it is directed unerringly toward the inner target. It is truly a turning inward. It is exploration, extension, and reflection of one’s innermost self. If I have been a rake at reading, the caprice has been to the outward eye alone. The inward spirit, I am convinced, knew very well what it was doing.
Books that find, and are found by, us help “enlarge and complete us” (ibid.). They do this in part by cultivating our power of feeling and sympathy to establish “the very fabric and atmosphere in which life is lived and from which it is perceived” (p. 221). Reading is the most convenient way to educate our feelings (p. 26).
Davies calls on readers like him—“those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books but do not live by books”—to recognise themselves as a “clerisy” (p. 234):
the clerisy do not want to take anything from anybody; they merely want to recover what was their own in those distant days before so much of our intellectual life was abandoned to the universities. They want to have a say in the world of books. They want the world of books, through them, to have its influence in the national life - social and political.