"I recommend the art of slow reading"
About this Quote
Against the algorithmic itch to skim, Amos Oz makes “slow reading” sound less like a hobby than a form of resistance. The line carries the quiet authority of a novelist who spent his career insisting that human beings aren’t reducible to slogans, tribes, or plot summaries. “Recommend” is doing real work here: it’s gentle, non-coercive, almost domestic. Oz isn’t issuing a manifesto; he’s offering a practice, as if the remedy for a harsh public world begins in the private act of attention.
The subtext is political without being partisan. Oz wrote out of Israel’s perpetual argument with itself and with its neighbors, and he was famously drawn to ambiguity: competing claims, contradictory memories, the unbearable mixed motives that make real people unreadable at first glance. Slow reading is a training ground for that moral muscle. You linger with a sentence long enough to notice what it refuses to resolve. You sit with a character long enough to see how easily your own certainty becomes caricature.
There’s also a sly defense of literature’s value at a time when culture rewards speed: hot takes, instant outrage, frictionless consumption. Slow reading rejects the market logic that treats texts as content and readers as throughput. It asks for something older and harder: intimacy with complexity. In Oz’s world, that intimacy isn’t aesthetic polish; it’s an ethical posture. If you can read a page patiently, you might manage to read a person the same way.
The subtext is political without being partisan. Oz wrote out of Israel’s perpetual argument with itself and with its neighbors, and he was famously drawn to ambiguity: competing claims, contradictory memories, the unbearable mixed motives that make real people unreadable at first glance. Slow reading is a training ground for that moral muscle. You linger with a sentence long enough to notice what it refuses to resolve. You sit with a character long enough to see how easily your own certainty becomes caricature.
There’s also a sly defense of literature’s value at a time when culture rewards speed: hot takes, instant outrage, frictionless consumption. Slow reading rejects the market logic that treats texts as content and readers as throughput. It asks for something older and harder: intimacy with complexity. In Oz’s world, that intimacy isn’t aesthetic polish; it’s an ethical posture. If you can read a page patiently, you might manage to read a person the same way.
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| Topic | Book |
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