how to read

1. Go to the art store and pick out a single color pencil. A highlighter is much too wet, a pencil is way too ugly, a pen is far too serious. A pen is like a knife and a pencil is like an unkept promise and a highlighter is like a bucket of water. A color pencil is just right.

2. Use the color pencil to highlight sentences and words you love. Now, you are no longer just reading, but also collecting. This active element helps me persist.

3. Always read those articles your friend sends you in full. Read the mission statement on the back of your cereal and the country of origin on the sticker of your produce. Read the whole triple-paragraph caption under that pregnancy announcement. You will find that you are, and always have been, surrounded by literature.

4. The books you pick up will come into your life for many different reasons, but you will find that the best arrive through trusted recommendation. Find out who influenced your influences, and who influenced them. This will create an ancestral line of meaning, and a library of favorites.

5. Keep a light poetry collection in your bag, and a heavy poetry collection on your breakfast table. Have an intimidating title that haunts your home, which you read slowly over the course of eight years. Acquire that hot new bestseller and read it on an exercise bike in three afternoons. Collect $70 hardcover art-books from museum gift shops with glossy pages and giant pictures. Stack them on the floors and tables, where they will serve as horizontal art, divination tools, conversation starters, bed trays, coasters, identity signifiers.

6. Allow all of the above to arrange into an altar around you.

7. People pretend there are readers and non-readers. But there are just people willing to practice the patience necessary to get hypnotized, and those who quit before their eyes turn into spirals. To read is to welcome this hypnosis, await its arrival, then trust its direction.

8. As you fulfill a session, notice the left of your book becoming heavier than the right. Breathe out as you reach the last page. Read that final sentence three times. Out loud, even.

9. To finish a book is to start a brand new life in the next town over. Gather all of your most cherished belongings, a loaf of bread, and a pad of butter. Wrap them all in a scarf, and tie this bundle to a stick to be carried over your shoulder. Kiss your lover goodbye, pat the dog, exit the door, and set out toward your future. 


・゜゜・・ﾟ☆ .・゜ ✧・゜゜・・ﾟ☆