The Pursuit of Reading

“In The Common Reader, VW (who borrowed her title from a phrase in Samuel Johnson’s Life of Gray) wrote ‘all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.’  The common reader, she said, ‘differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.  Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole’.”

– excerpt from Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman