**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Damon Young|Damon Young]] # Book Overview ![[The Art of Reading Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Damon Young is an Australian philosopher and writer, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He's written seven books, including *How to Think About Exercise*, *Philosophy in the Garden*, and *Distraction*. His work sits at the intersection of philosophy and everyday life -- he's interested in what classical thinkers can tell us about ordinary human activities. Young writes with a confessional streak, drawing on his own reading history from childhood Sherlock Holmes obsessions through teenage cowardice with T.S. Eliot to adult Star Trek binges. He's widely read across philosophy, fiction, poetry, comics and graphic novels, and isn't shy about mixing Heidegger with Batman. ## Central Thesis Reading isn't a rudimentary skill you acquire in childhood and then forget about. It's an art -- a creative, psychologically demanding activity that requires the same kind of character development Aristotle described with his concept of *arete* (excellence). Young's argument is that reading is always a meeting of two liberties: the author's and the reader's. The text is only half-finished by the writer. Without a reader willing to commit imagination, intelligence, and emotional honesty to the words, nothing happens. The marks on the page remain inert. Young structures this around six classical virtues adapted for readers: curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice. Each virtue is a mean between extremes -- curiosity can tip into projection (Heidegger reading his own philosophy into Parmenides), patience into servility (finishing bad books out of duty), courage into recklessness, pride into either vanity or pusillanimity. The book argues that reading well isn't passive consumption. It's an ongoing negotiation between thought and feeling, spontaneity and habit, deference and critique. We don't just need to read -- we need to develop the character to read well. ## Why This Book Matters There's a massive industry around writing -- degrees, masterclasses, workshops, festivals -- but almost nothing equivalent for reading. Young points out this imbalance directly: eight out of ten Americans want to write a book, but a quarter haven't read one in the past year. The cult of the author has eclipsed the reader's creative role. This book pushes back against that, making a case that reading deserves the same serious attention we give to writing, and that how we read shapes who we become. It also matters because Young doesn't treat reading as purely instrumental. He's skeptical of the research claiming fiction makes you more empathetic or that reading prevents dementia -- not hostile to it, but honest about the limitations of small sample sizes and vague measures. His argument is that reading is valuable as an experience, for its own sake, and that this experience requires genuine effort and self-knowledge. In an era of infinite content and shrinking attention spans, the idea that reading demands character -- not just literacy -- feels urgent. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Liberating Pages Young opens with his childhood bookcase and the discovery, through Sherlock Holmes, that reading is an act of power. The 11-year-old boy realised that the dark marks on paper were his to investigate or ignore, enrich or evade. He traces similar moments of literary awakening through William Gibson, Orhan Pamuk, Edith Wharton, Rousseau, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Each discovered what de Beauvoir called "the sorcery that transmutes printed symbols into stories" -- and each recognised that without a reader, the magic stops. This leads into Sartre's argument that the text is always half-finished by the writer. Reading requires autonomy -- no one compels you to envision their words. Young introduces his framework: reading as a meeting of two liberties, the author's and the audience's. He maps this onto Aristotle's concept of virtue (*arete*), arguing that reading well requires a *hexis* -- a developed disposition, not a one-off mental state. Each virtue is a mean between extremes. The chapter also diagnoses why reading's art is neglected: literacy feels automatic after childhood, the activity is invisible to others, and the freedom it reveals can cause existential anxiety. Young introduces the six virtues -- curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice -- and frames the book as an exercise in gregarious reading: a public reflection on a private art. ## Curiosity: The Infinite Library Borges is the central figure here. Young uses the Argentine's "Library of Babel" and his lifelong bibliophilia to illustrate curiosity as the reader's foundational virtue. Drawing on David Hume's *Treatise*, he defines curiosity not as desire for facts but as pleasure in the labour of discovering them -- "the love of truth" as an end in itself, not a means to career advancement. But the chapter's real muscle comes from its counterexample: Heidegger reading Parmenides. Young shows how Heidegger's "curious" readings of the Presocratics were actually projections -- the German philosopher kept finding his own philosophy in four pages of ancient fragments. Heidegger acknowledged the "violence" of his reading, even admitted his study of Kant was dodgy Kant but excellent Heidegger. The problem wasn't inventive interpretation -- it was confusing his own creations with the author's achievements. Curiosity turns monstrous when it no longer respects what Bakhtin called the "will" of the author. Young then turns the lens on himself, examining his own fascination with Batman and the mixed motives behind his scholarly strutting. ## Patience: Boredom at Buckingham Palace Alan Bennett's *The Uncommon Reader* provides the frame: Queen Elizabeth II, reading Henry James at teatime, shouting "Oh, do get on" at his circumlocutory prose. Young uses this to explore patience as a literary virtue, grounded in William James's psychology of time. Boredom in reading isn't just about slow prose -- it's a confrontation with your own mental vacancy. When attention dims, you're stuck facing the empty cadence of your own consciousness. The chapter distinguishes patient reading from mere stubbornness. The Queen's patience with James is rewarded because James actually merits forbearance -- his psychological acumen and aesthetic ambition pay off. Dan Brown, by contrast, doesn't deserve the same perseverance. His *Da Vinci Code* is simultaneously easy and harrying: pure plot without psychological complication, prose made entirely of clichés. To finish Brown for scholarly insight isn't patience -- it's closer to Aristotle's "servility." Patience is knowing the price of difficult reading and having the determination to pay it, but also knowing when the price isn't worth it. The chapter also argues for patience with ourselves as readers -- some books require maturity we don't yet have. Evelyn Waugh's joy in discovering Henry James in middle age, or Sheila Kaye-Smith's recognition that Dickens's humour requires adult self-awareness, illustrate that we sometimes need to wait for experience to catch up. ## Courage: The Ninja of Unfinishedness Young's most personal chapter, built around a childhood obsession with "The Way of the Tiger" gamebooks. The final volume, *Inferno!*, ended without resolution -- every path led to a monstrous web, waiting for a spider. This non-ending was psychologically painful because, as Dewey argued, we're creatures of rhythm who crave completion. The courage was in re-reading the book knowing this, enduring the lack of "tock." This expands into a broader argument about literary courage as resistance to the tyranny of finality. Berlin's warning that the possibility of a final solution is "an illusion, and a very dangerous one" applies to reading too. Young then confesses his own teenage cowardice -- retreating from Eliot's "Prufrock" because its portrait of hesitation and inadequacy hit too close. He sneered at the poem and its classroom milieu, using ironic distance as psychological armor. Years later, as an undergraduate, the same poem became liberating. The chapter frames literary cowardice as a form of Sartre's "bad faith" -- denying your freedom to be disturbed by what you read. Cowardly reading isn't avoiding horror novels. It's refusing to imagine the things that genuinely terrify you. ## Pride: Gospel Untruths Kazantzakis's *The Last Temptation of Christ* anchors this chapter. The novel was condemned by Orthodox clergy who had never read it -- they invented the blasphemies they attributed to Kazantzakis. This is vanity in reading: claiming knowledge you don't possess, using an author as a foil for your own righteousness. The flip side is Pascal, whom Nietzsche both admired and pitied. Pascal brought fierce analytical intellect to psychology and physics, but surrendered that same intellect when reading scripture. His humility before the Bible was what Aristotle called pusillanimity -- an excessive modesty that wastes genuine talent. Nietzsche wrote that Christianity "destroyed men like Pascal" by making their moments of weakness into their best selves. Young resolves this with Whitehead, who read the Bible critically precisely because he respected religion. Whitehead suggested replacing Revelation's threats with Pericles's funeral oration -- persuasion instead of coercion. The proud reader recognises that pronouncements of perfection are always flawed, and this awareness is itself a form of pride: pleasure in thinking ambitiously about our own humble finitude. ## Temperance: Appetite for Distraction Young confesses to binge-reading Star Trek novels -- over a third of his tablet's fiction archive, all purchased in eight months, most deleted after finishing. He frames this as Aristotle's *akolasia* (intemperance): not an addiction to food or drink, but a badly managed craving for psychological repose. The Star Trek novels left no lingering atmosphere, no memorable plot. They were literary incense, clouding consciousness rather than clearing it. The remedy came from an unlikely source: A.J. Ayer's *Language, Truth and Logic*. Ayer's combative, austere prose refused any comforts -- it pulled Young away from covetous reverie toward public facts. This parallels Iris Murdoch's concept of "unselfing" -- art at its best draws us away from egocentric fantasies toward honest perception. Young also discusses Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's suspicion of reading itself. Both warned that reading can become a distraction from thinking -- the "safest way of having no thoughts of one's own." But both also read voraciously in practice, revealing the gap between published philosophy and private habit. Young coins the term literary *anorexia* -- a healthy loss of appetite that marks a deeper commitment. Sometimes, having read enough, the right move is to close the book and walk away. ## Justice: No I Said No I Won't No Woolf's hostile reading of Joyce's *Ulysses* is the case study. She found it underbred, pimply, the work of a "callow board school boy." Young carefully unpacks this: Woolf's class snobbery, her competitive anxiety (Joyce was a rival "spiritual" novelist), her admitted unwillingness to give herself to the text as she recommended others do. She hung back, and in doing so sold Joyce short. She later admitted she'd "scamped the virtue of it." Young uses Aristotle's categories of injustice to classify Woolf's response -- not cold-blooded corruption, but an unjust act driven by anger and pride. He then broadens the argument: justice in reading means giving authors their dues, which requires all the other virtues working together. *Ulysses* demands patience (for Joyce's elaborate lists and style shifts), curiosity (for the web of literary references), courage (for the way it undermines the traditional novel), and temperance (resisting the impulse to consume it as mere entertainment). Justice is "complete excellence" -- not a single virtue but the harmonious exercise of all of them. ## The Lumber Room A brief, warm closing chapter contrasting Sherlock Holmes's utilitarian view of books (mind furniture, stored for convenience) with Saki's story of a boy discovering wonder in a lumber room. Young aligns himself with the latter: his library is a constellation of wonder, reverie, and shock, not a filing cabinet of useful facts. This leads into an extensive annotated bibliography of every work referenced in the book -- generous, opinionated, and often funny. --- # Key Takeaways ## Core Ideas 1. Reading is a meeting of two liberties -- the author's and the reader's. The text is half-finished without you. This isn't a metaphor; it's a philosophical claim about how meaning works. 2. Reading well requires developed character, not just literacy. The six virtues -- curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice -- aren't rules. They're dispositions built through practice, each a mean between deficiency and excess. 3. Curiosity is pleasure in the labor of discovery, not hunger for facts. But it turns monstrous when it projects the reader's obsessions onto the author's work (Heidegger with Parmenides). 4. Literary cowardice isn't avoiding scary books. It's refusing to engage with texts that threaten your psychological comfort -- sneering at what you fear, clinging to ironic distance. 5. Pride in reading means neither worshipping texts as sacred relics nor dismissing them as beneath you. It's a critical intellect unhampered by deferential lowliness -- proud enough to question, humble enough to know you're fallible. 6. Intemperance in reading is using books as psychological anaesthetic -- consuming familiar, unchallenging work to cloud consciousness rather than clear it. 7. Justice is the master virtue: it requires all the others working together, and its core demand is simple -- give the author their dues before you judge. --- # Notable Quotes > "Reading is always a meeting of two liberties: the artist's and the audience's." > "De Beauvoir called this 'the sorcery that transmutes printed symbols into stories': without a reader, the magic stops." > "What you are doing right now is, cosmically speaking, against the odds." > "Reading is desirable for its own sake and, unless it causes harm, no excuses need be given." > "In the infinite library, Martin Heidegger kept borrowing volumes by Martin Heidegger." > "At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak, they tenderise one." -- Bennett's Queen Elizabeth on books > "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." -- T.S. Eliot, describing the feeling Young recognised in himself as a teenager > "One should never forgive Christianity for having destroyed men like Pascal." -- Nietzsche --- # Connections & Further Reading - [[After Virtue]] by Alasdair MacIntyre -- Young's entire framework of reader's virtues is built on MacIntyre's revival of Aristotelian ethics and his argument that virtues are best developed communally. - [[Being and Time]] by Martin Heidegger -- Young engages with Heidegger's concept of *Angst* (the anxiety of existential freedom) as a reason people resist acknowledging their role as active readers. - [[Art as Experience]] by John Dewey -- Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience as a rhythm of doing and undergoing runs through Young's argument about patience, courage, and completeness. - [[The Sovereignty of Good]] by Iris Murdoch -- Murdoch's concept of "unselfing" through art directly informs Young's chapter on temperance and the danger of reading as psychological escape. - [[What is Literature?]] by Jean-Paul Sartre -- Sartre's theory of reading as an "appeal" to the reader's freedom is the philosophical backbone of the entire book. - [[The Uncommon Reader]] by Alan Bennett -- Bennett's novella about Queen Elizabeth II discovering reading late in life provides Young's central illustration of patience. - [[Pensées]] by Blaise Pascal -- Young uses Pascal as a warning against excessive humility before texts, particularly scripture. - [[Labyrinths]] by Jorge Luis Borges -- Borges's "Library of Babel" and his compulsive literary cross-referencing exemplify the virtue of curiosity. --- # Personal Reflection ## What surprised me? The chapter on temperance. Young's confession about binge-reading Star Trek novels is disarmingly honest, and his analysis of *why* it was a problem goes beyond the usual "read better books" advice. It's not that genre fiction is bad -- it's that he was using it to cloud consciousness rather than clear it. The idea that the remedy came from A.J. Ayer's *Language, Truth and Logic* is unexpected and convincing. Sometimes the cure for intellectual laziness isn't a better novel but a book that refuses to comfort you at all. ## What challenged me? The argument about literary cowardice. Young's teenage rejection of "Prufrock" -- sneering at it because its portrait of hesitation was too close to his own experience -- is an uncomfortable mirror. How often do I dismiss a book as pretentious, boring, or irrelevant when the real problem is that it touches something I'd rather not examine? The Sartrean framing of this as "bad faith" is sharp: you have to know exactly what you're avoiding in order to avoid it. ## What will I apply? Young's distinction between patience and servility. Not every book deserves to be finished, and knowing the difference is itself a skill. The Dan Brown test is useful: if perseverance won't produce insight, psychological depth, or aesthetic reward, putting the book down isn't giving up -- it's good judgment. I'll also try to be more honest about my own reading temperance -- noticing when I'm reaching for the familiar because it's comfortable, not because it's worthwhile.