The Price of Reading (Blog #2)

In the article, "The Price of Reading is Eternal Vigilance," the author Anatole Broyard who is 53 years old is just learning how to read as he analyzes that, "most people read badly." He explains that reading goes beyond just skimming your eyes across the words on the page, but to occupy the book and "stop around" in it. Broyard also goes into detail that there should be a voice between the text and the reader.

To me the author used a lot of great imagery sentences and words to get the reader to imagine what Broyard was going through as being a new reader. Using words like "as soon as I open it, I occupy the book, I stop around in it," " Make them feel your presence. Shine your intelligence in their eyes." These sentences really jumped out at me as I read the article and I started to create this picture in my head of what it was like for him. As Barbi wrote in her blog post on this article, I agree too that the author uses a lot of medical terms. Bryoard begins to talk about how he feels about being around books and used words like fear of "cracking the spine" of the book, "sterile," and making sure his "hands were clean" before taking out the book. It was very interesting to me that he would use medical terms to describe his situation, but it made an interesting twist to the reading.

This article reminds me a lot of myself. I have never liked to read and still to this day hate reading. It takes me forever to understand the concepts of what I read. As I think to myself I wonder if this is because I don't make the reading understandable to me. I feel like most of the things I read I just skim over and let it cross my eyes once. I love the passage in this article when the author talks about stomping around in the book and scribbling out words to make whatever he is reading “his own version,” just for him to understand. I think what I need to start doing is "talk back" to the book and make what I am reading my own version. This way I can start to communicate with myself what I am reading. Overall I agree 100% with what the author has to say in this article.