Sure reading is fundamental to learning and making your way in this life.
I mean that reading is, of course, of enormous utility. You need it as a tool to learn and get through school.
But outside of the necessary education, a reading life should be less serious than probably first considered.
Reading is not a contest or a diet, after all.
I think this is all such good advice.
Read widely if in doubt. And slow down.
You should be enjoying yourself.
I, for one, will try to heed the impulsive approach of Randall Jarrell.
Simply: Read at whim!
So one reason I usually decline to give reading recommendations is that I don’t want to encourage such habits of mind. But there’s a positive counterpart to this negative reason: my commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim. I learned this principle from the essayist and poet Randall Jarrell, who once met a scholar, a learned man
and a critic, who commented that he read Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim every year.
-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction
