Loving to Read

"If anything, the fervor of the Janeites [i folli amanti di Jane Austen] puts into relief a fact almost too obvious to notice: the world of books is a romantic world. Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (“I just saw it there in the bookstore!”) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?" Joshua Rothman, newyorker.
Nell'articolo sono citati gli autori cult del momento e, sorpresa sorpresa, c'è la nostra Elena Ferrante! insieme a Karl Ove Knausgaard. Il libro recensito è Loving Literature: A Cultural History di Deidre Shauna Lynch (University of Chicago Press). (La bella foto è di Ferdinando Scianna)