Virtues And Vices

Yet another good piece in today's Sunday Times by Janadas Devan on the virtues of the vice of reading. He tells of how he frequently takes more books with him on vacation than he has any reasonable chance of paying due attention to. In fact, he's a lot worse than me in this respect so that I felt quite virtuous reading the article. I particularly liked the ending in which he notes how guilt - at not reading something - can function as an excellent motivator for getting the job done. That I can completely identify with.

It's certainly refreshing to have something in the newspaper that implies that it's a reasonable, in fact normal, thing for folk to read the likes of Tolstoy, Kant, Heidegger, Dante and Huxley for pleasure. It's an Huxley essay from the 1920's on tourists and what they take along to read that underpins Mr Devan's piece, in fact. A nice bit of cross-referencing. Unfortunately it's less refreshing to note that the review page devoted to reading this Sunday has got itself reduced to just half a page which deals only with the buying of books on line. Reading nation, here we come!