"The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable"
About this Quote
Broyard is arguing for a kind of reading that looks suspiciously like a conversation with someone smarter than you - and he does it by praising slowness, that unfashionable virtue. "The more I like a book, the more slowly I read" flips the usual badge of cultural competence (speed, volume, productivity) into something closer to intimacy. If you rush, you're treating the text like content to be processed. If you linger, you're granting it the dignity of resistance: you pause, you argue, you reread, you savor. The real compliment isn't finishing; it's being interrupted by your own mind.
The lowercase "this" in the second sentence feels intentionally casual, as if he's catching himself mid-thought, making a small confession rather than issuing a rule. That matters: Broyard is the critic as essayist, not the critic as judge. His subtext is anti-authoritarian. A beloved book doesn't hypnotize you into agreement; it provokes you into "talking back". The value of reading, then, isn't absorption but friction - the moment you push against a sentence and discover what you actually think.
Contextually, this sits inside Broyard's broader project of rescuing reading from institutional pieties. As a mid-century critic suspicious of both academic solemnity and mass-culture haste, he frames literature as lived experience: private, argumentative, bodily (you feel the brakes go on). In an attention economy that rewards skimming, Broyard makes a sly claim: the best books don't take your time; they give you your mind back.
The lowercase "this" in the second sentence feels intentionally casual, as if he's catching himself mid-thought, making a small confession rather than issuing a rule. That matters: Broyard is the critic as essayist, not the critic as judge. His subtext is anti-authoritarian. A beloved book doesn't hypnotize you into agreement; it provokes you into "talking back". The value of reading, then, isn't absorption but friction - the moment you push against a sentence and discover what you actually think.
Contextually, this sits inside Broyard's broader project of rescuing reading from institutional pieties. As a mid-century critic suspicious of both academic solemnity and mass-culture haste, he frames literature as lived experience: private, argumentative, bodily (you feel the brakes go on). In an attention economy that rewards skimming, Broyard makes a sly claim: the best books don't take your time; they give you your mind back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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