What if a great intellectual reading exercise is to simply read as widely as possible?
Reading from an eclectic mix of topics from different time periods…
You might follow up a Churchill biography, with a book on humor, and then circle back to a text on writing, followed by a text on religion and
Just keep it moving, if you ask me.
I mean, who wants to read only a handful of topics by only a handful of authors?
Thank goodness that whole printing press and internet thing finally took off.
Try it out maybe, it’s just an idea.
Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press. When books were scarce the situation was different: the North African boy who later became known to history as St. Augustine spent countless hours of his education poring over, analyzing word-by-word, and memorizing a handful of books, most of them by Virgil and Cicero; this model was followed largely because no one had many books, so each one was treated as precious. Augustine’s biographer Peter Brown has commented that some of Augustine’s intellectual eccentricities are the product of “a mind steeped too long in too few books”—something that can be said of almost nobody today.
-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction
