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    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books
    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books
    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books
    Ebook66 pages56 minutes

    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books

    By The London Library

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A collection of writing by early members of The London Library about their relationships with books, celebrating its 175th anniversary
    This little body of thought, that lies before me in the shape of a book, has existed thousands of years, nor since the invention of the press can anything short of an universal convulsion of nature abolish it
    The London Library's members are, by their nature, interested in reading and preserving books. Many of the members have been, and still are today, some of the most impressive writers and thinkers of their time: from Dickens to David Hare, from Alfred Lord Tennyson to Kazuo Ishiguro.
    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books collects writing by some of the early members of The London Library: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, EM Forster and Virginia Woolf, among others, write about the joy of living with books.
    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books is part of 'Found on the Shelves', published with The London Library. The books in this series have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over 17 miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPushkin Press
    Release dateMay 5, 2016
    ISBN9781782272618
    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books

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    • 4/5
      Charming little book and so well-written.

    Book preview

    On Reading, Writing and Living with Books - The London Library

    HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?

    Published in 1932

    BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

    V

    IRGINIA

    W

    OOLF

    (1882–1941) was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, who was President of The London Library from 1892 until his death in 1904. During his lifetime, Virginia had access to the collections of the Library, and she joined in her own right just four days after his death, giving her occupation as Spinster. She was one of the greatest novelists and essayists of the twentieth century.

    In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

    But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is the very spot? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?

    It is simple enough to say that since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.

    But when you attempt to reconstruct it in

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