(You) got to have faith!

C.S. Lewis - An Experiment in Criticism
Some words from Chapter One

"In this essay I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticim is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men's reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by recersing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or tpyes of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how fas ir might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read another."

"In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers 'I've already read it' to be a conclusive arguement against reading a work. We have all known women who remember a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday's paper; they had already used it. Those who read great workds, on the other had, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

Secondly, the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readders, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep'. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, while listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparision. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.

Finally, and as a natural result of their different behavior in reading, what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind of hte few, but not to that of the many. The former mouth over their favourite lines and stanzas in solitude. scenes and characters from the book provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. they talk to one another about books, often and at length. The latter seldom thing or talk of their reading. "

That's all I have time for now. Maybe I'll post more later. I am reading this book for the second time this year. It is really interesting. I'm going to clean my room and read. I told myself I had to clean my room before I read any more. But I never said that I couldn't post what I read before I cleaned my room. Haha. Enjoy.