Blog - Tag: reading

By my latest count, I have heard the following dictum at least a dozen times in the last month: “literary analysis destroys the love of reading.”

Parents and teachers who say this often assert that reading, especially among the very young, is primarily an experience of the heart and soul, to be shared between parents and children, and that too strong an emphasis on mental exercise prevents them from using story time to build deep relationships.

Seek ye first the walk and all these things will be added unto you.

Why walk? When I was a child, people would walk a path around the mall. They started early on Saturday mornings and would have already walked many laps before I arrived, pocket full of quarters, to challenge the arcade. Walkers still walk today, although I suspect fewer of them are in the even fewer malls while many of them are marching through neighborhoods, armed with Fitbits.

One of the hardest things about getting older is the decreasing time ahead of you to catch up on reading. Even reading one hundred books a year for the next twenty years is not going to do it. I feel about my To-Be-Read pile as my husband does about the salaries of major league baseball players. He would have to work for one hundred and fifty  years or more to make what some of those guys make in one year. It is not a hopeful thought.

In the first chapter of his first published work of literary criticism, The Allegory of Love (1936), Lewis, while attempting to unpack for the modern reader Chrétien de Troyes’s allegorical treatment of Love and Hate, offers this sage advice: “We have to worm our way very cautiously into the minds of these old writers: an a priori assumption as to what can, and what can not, be the expression of real imaginative experiences is the worst possible guide.” As we saw earlier, Lewis advocated, and carried out in his own work, a kind of genial criticism that respects the beliefs of the a