Andy Miller Quotes

In short, this was a period in which the phrase 'you're never alone with a good book' started to sound less like a promise and more like a threat.

As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, 'It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.

I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.' Homer, The Odyssey

In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.

Moby-Dick is a long, grueling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconsious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chicked it aside and thought: wow - I really ought to read something good.

I don't know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park - I doubt you have - but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamor of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.

How I loved the municipal libraries of South Croydon. They were not child-friendly places; in fact, they were not friendly at all, to anyone. They were large, dark, wood-panelled rooms full of books, in which visitors were expected to be silent, and the only sound was the clicking of school shoes on polished parquet floor. The larger building in the town had its own children's library, accessible at one end of the hall via an imposing door, but what lay behind that door was not a children's library as we might understand it today, full of scatter cushions and toys and strategies of appeasement; it revealed simply a smaller, replica wood-panelled room full of books. And this - the shared expectation of respect, the solemnity, the shelves crammed end-to-end with books, no face-outs or yawning gaps - is what I loved about these places and what I found inspiring. The balance of power lay with the books, not the public. This would never be permitted today.

if you like reading, this is the object, unbeknownst to you, you have been waiting for; but if you love reading as I do, you may struggle to comprehend what all the fuss is about. Did it make reading better? Of course not. It's a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it. I take the Kindle with me wherever I go. But I also take a good book.

On average, everyone has read The Da Vinci Code. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have.

That's the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth.

I felt the unmistakable certainty that I had been in the presence of great art, and that my heart had opened in reply.

When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone.

Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.

Let us adopt a symbologist approach to our subjects and see whether there are any invisible connections buried just beneath the surface. One anagram of "Herman Melville, Moby Dick" would be "Hmm-- a credible milky novel." Shuffle the letters of "Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code", and we uncover this message: "B. was a contrived, hidden con." And rearranging "Andy Miller-- The Year of Reading Dangerously" proves what we have suspected for a while: "I am only a greying fatheaded Surrey nerd-- LOL."
Dr. Langdon may be onto something.

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies.

All these sorts of book feature in The Year of Reading Dangerously, which could yet be called Fifty Shades of Great.

We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say 'I like this' or 'I don't like that', to make snap decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps 'I don't like it' is an inadequate response. Don't like Middlemarch? It doesn't matter. It was here before we arrived, and will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn't get it. I need to try harder.

Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church.