Importance Of Reading

896 Words4 Pages
The Importance of Reading Not everyone has the same reading style as another person. Some read at a slow pace, imagining the story in their head. Others can ‘speed read’ where they can read an entire book in as little as a day, and still get the gist of the book. But with new technology coming out so quickly, people have shifted over to things such as audio books and tablets. I want to persuade people to want to get more into reading and really pay attention to what the words on the page are saying. While you might think, how can one get more into a story, one author actually addressed the topic. Author Mortimer J. Adler wrote a passage named ‘How to Mark a Book’, where he talked about how a reader could get more from his book if he simply “read between the lines” (pg. 13). In his story, he stressed on how a reader could become one with his book by writing in between lines, on the margins, and the beginning and ending pages. He also made it a point to list how one could ‘mark a book intelligently and fruitfully’ (pg. 15). His purpose was to help readers get deeper in the world of the words and really understand what the author is feeling. In his essay, Adler says, “You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher’s ice-box to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it in your bloodstream” (pg 13). I think that this statement made an excellent point and backed up his essay and his attempt to show us how to mark a book. We can say that we own a book simply because we purchased it, but when we add our annotation, we are stepping into the world of the author and claiming ownership. I like this quote because it shows how truly important reading can be. In the essay, Adler says, “[i]t is possible for a man to acquire the idea, to possess the idea, to posses the beauty, which a great book contains” (pg.
Open Document