The Forgotten Art of Reading a Book Without Having an Opinion About It

Why Reading a Book With an Open Mind Changes Everything (Picture Credit – Pinterest)

Somewhere around chapter three, it starts. A small voice begins drafting the review. Is this overrated? How many stars does it deserve? Will it make a good post? Before the story has finished speaking, we have already decided what we think of it. Many of us no longer read books so much as audit them.

This is not entirely our fault. Star ratings, shared shelves and year-end tallies have turned reading into something to be measured and displayed. Opinions are rewarded, while silence goes unseen. A book finished without a take can feel, oddly, like a book that did not count. But a mind busy judging is only half listening, and something quiet is lost in the noise.

Before the Verdict: The Quiet Art of Letting a Book Speak First (Picture Credit – Pinterest)

In December 1817, the 22-year-old John Keats wrote to his brothers about a quality he believed great writers possessed. He called it “negative capability”: the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Keats was describing poets, but the idea applies just as well to…

Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle