“The Love of Reading” Virginia Woolf
“The Love of Reading” by Virginia Woolf is about how literature reading affects our lives and how we affect the world of writing. Virginia Woolf says that as a reader, your first duty is to read a book like you were the one writing it and to try to understand what the author is writing. Each book is different but they all have the same purpose, “an attempt to make something,” which is why we cannot read books by comparing them with other books. Woolf says that the impression that the book leaves you should be compared to the impressions other books have left. Reading gives us pleasure and we are stimulating, encouraging, and rejecting.
Virginia Woolf talks a lot about following your instincts and interpreting literary work. When she talks about “how one should read a book” I comprehended it as, no one can tell you how something should or should not be read; only your instincts can tell you. This part of the essay appealed to me because, I have always been told how I should write and criticized on my writing so when she said to trust my own instincts I realized it was because everyone is different and they write in different ways so you should just write the way you do. I have the same opinion as Woolf when she talked about how readers must erase everything in our minds in order to be able to understand the written piece. Interpretations of readers come from their personal history, gender, age, and life experiences. So if we have an open