Roland Barthes on reading

Roland Barthes reflects on his attitude to books and reading:

I’m not a great reader, I’m a casual reader, casual in the sense that I very quickly take the measure of my own pleasure. If a book bores me, I have the courage, or cowardice, to drop it. I’m freeing myself more and more from any superego in regards to books. So, if I read a book, it’s because I want to.

My reading schedule is not at all a regular and placid ingestion of books. Either a book bores me and I put it aside, or it excites me and I constantly want to stop reading it so that I can think about what I’ve just read – which is also reflected in the way I read for my work: I’m unable, unwilling, to sum up a book, to efface myself behind a capsule description of it on an index card, but on the contrary, I’m quite ready to pick out certain sentences, certain characteristics of the book, to ingest them as discontinuous fragments. This is obviously not good philological attitude, since it comes down to deforming the book for my own purposes. (Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, pp. 220–1)

As the years go by and the pile of books ‘you really ought to read’ grows inexorably taller, I find myself sympathizing more and more with these sentiments. And I find his assessment of his use of books in his academic work refreshingly honest.