"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you."
Info & reflection: forcing a book at the wrong moment only teaches you to hate it, and you lose it for the moment when it would have mattered. It holds for almost every book, but not for Scripture, which you don't read out of appetite but as a daily commitment: there the right time isn't known in advance, you are present when it comes. Some books wait for you; others you wait for.
Related in anthology
- The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world... The moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world. — Reading opens worlds, but only if the book arrives at its time.