"I venture that it is impossible to listen to other people the way we listen to a very good book. Lyric poetry, at its strongest, teaches us how to talk to ourselves, rather than to others. The solitary reader may be a vanishing breed, but more than the enjoyment of solitude then will vanish also. The ultimate answer to the question 'Why read?' is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self. Until you become yourself, what benefit can you be to others? I remember always the admonition of the sage Hillel, most humane of ancient rabbis: 'If I am not for me, then who will be for me? And if I am for myself only, then what am I? And if not now, when?' ...[In books] characters meet other characters as we meet new persons, open to the disorders of discovery, and we need to be open to what we read, in a parallel way.
When you meet a new person, you are ill-advised to begin the acquaintance either with condescension or with fear. When you read even the most formidable literary work for a first time -- be it Dante's Divine Comedy or Henry James's The Wings of the Dove -- condescension or fear would destroy your understanding and your pleasure. Perhaps we all need initially to relax our will-to-power when we open a book. Such a will may return after we have immersed ourselves, and have given the writer every chance to usurp our attention. There are many different ways to read well, but all involve a receptivity in our attention. I have little understanding of Buddhism (my temperament being an impatient one), so Wordsworth's 'wise passivity' seems my best synonym for the kind of attention that good reading requires."
From Bloom's How to Read & Why (Scribner, 2000)
See also: "How Should One Read a Book?"
