Notable quote

Perpetually behind, reading but not able to take the time to write reflective posts, I came across the following quote from Walt Whitman in the prologue to Sara Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America. It seemed to sum up so much of why I think blogging about books is important --

the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; . . . the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay -- the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.