Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.