There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing, 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook (via austinkleon)
I had never seen this passage before, but it certainly chimes with a section of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:
I was twenty years old before I failed to finish a book I had started: it was The Recognitions, a novel by William Gaddis, and I gave up, after an extended period of moral paralysis, at page 666. That day I grieved, feeling that I had been forced from some noble pedestal; but I woke up the next morning with my soul singing. After all, though I would never get back the hours I had devoted to those 666 pages, the hours I would have spent ploughing through the remaining 400 were mine to spend as I would. I had been granted time as a pure and sweet gift.
Of course, once you have abandoned a book after more than six hundred pages, abandoning one after fifty seems trivial. But for me that wasn’t a bad thing. I needed to overcome the sense of duty that had marched me through so many books before the ultimately liberating, if at the time miserable, experience of The Recognitions; and I needed to learn, as I eventually did, that if I set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later — nor am I promising to do so. To everything there is a season, and, by corollary, everything is sometimes out of season. Perhaps there will even come a time for me to read The Recognitions. But no one will be able to tell me when that season comes; I will have to discern that for myself, with the aid of many years of reflecting on the kind of reader I am.
