Reading Response Journal for Wednesday, 8/31

                            In the essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” Virginia Woolf suggests that a person should never take advice on how to read because it is supposed to be instinctive and one should figure that on his own without someone telling him. You should not take advice on books according to the author, also because books don’t have laws to abide. Woolf also asks not to dictate an author but be his fellow-worker; his accomplice.  I understand what he means in that sense because when you criticize you hold yourself back from learning the big picture the author has in mind.  He then follows by explaining poetry and then explains the point of the whole experience of reading, which is to do it because you love to and not because you have to. In the second reading “Never Do That to a Book”, Anne Fadiman differentiates between two types of booklovers. People that believe in treating books like newborns; extremely carefully and taking care of them in every way and people that believe it shows no disrespect to a book´s content if they dog-ear the pages or rip out chapters. After a while of pondering, I think I seem to appear that I am a blend of both extremes. I would never break the spine of my books or dog-ear the pages intently but my university books are almost totally destroyed. I write and doodle on them, fold the pages, stuff them in a bag where they can move around and highlight a lot of passages.