The Collaborating Reader

THE READING OF BOOKS (292 pp ]

Holbrook Jackson--Scrlbner ($3).

Reading "has the virtue of being one of the few entirely disinterested occupations ... being a method of further implementing the art of living by enriching the mind, sharpening the wits, and refining the senses. The end of reading is not more books but more life."

On this theme, Holbrook Jackson, eminent British bibliophile, essayist and editor, begins a leisurely but purposeful wandering through the land of literature. He comments widely on the aims, techniques, and inner lives of writers from Horace to Hemingway, trying always to get behind the props and wings of the literary stage.

The Risk of Dyspepsia. Reading, says Essayist Jackson, is an art. The real reader is a collaborating artist in the production of literature. "The writer expresses himself in a book, the reader through a book. Reading at its most intense becomes writing by proxy. When Schopenhauer said that reading was merely thinking with other people's brains, he was right. Reading is even further in that direction. IHs becoming someone else for the time being . . . and when we read we do not so much enter into the souls of others; we let them enter into us. We become Shakespeare or his characters. . . ."

The "fit reader" selects and delves. He ruminates. "To scamper through a book is like bolting your food: you miss the flavor and risk dyspepsia." The creative reader is not necessarily widely read: "The well-read man is often one who has accumulated knowledge at the expense of imagination." Real reading is a process of remembering. "Books rarely if ever put anything into the mind of the reader which is not already there. The primary effect of reading is awakening, not informing. . . Books startle the mind into closer and more vivid contact with its own culture, or send it adventuring into strange places. . . . Unless in some way or at some time words, sentences, or books explode thus beneficently and creatively, not only revealing life but showing us how to live, reading is a waste of time."

The Hope of a Kick. The Reading of Books is no fare for the page-skipper or the love-novel addict. But even for the incorrigibly lazy reader, Holbrook Jackson has a word of hope:

"No amount of education has entirely succeeded in doping the popular mind into complete uniformity, for however uniform the doped minds of the masses may appear to be, somewhere lurks the undefeated ... ego waiting a chance of 'breaking through' and asserting itself. Often the last kick of indomitable individuality is against the accepted meaning of words, it is none the less a kick even if it misses its mark, like the legendary old lady who had always been under the impression that Cherubim and Seraphim were 'man and wife like Sodom and Gomorrah.' "

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