MUSING OF THE DAY

Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging, and praising or condemning, the books they read – their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten. They have, perhaps, been brought to this pass by the fact that so much of current writing outside the sphere of the exact sciences manifests so little concern with truth. One might hazard the guess that if saying something is true, in any sense of that term, were ever again to become the primary concern it should be, fewer books would be written, published, and read.

HOW TO READ A BOOK