Where The Muses Still Haunt The Second Reading

Re-reading is one of life's joys, anne drury hall reminds us.Not simply from the sweetness of remembering or because of the way a book can be like an old friend, but because returning to a great book is inseparable from the endeavor to succeed at being human.The pull of something old and steady and reliable, the pull to rise to a higher plane is an important aspect of this experience, where the reader truly notices and connects with the world and himself.This is why books are the cornerstones of education and the source of the power of concentration. After leaving school and becoming lost in adulthood, can one return to these books and revive the quest to be great for this is why we call such books great . Yet as hall says, few people use the phrase 'great books' any more except ironically, because there is an odd view in the current intellectual fog that there is no such thing as 'greatness' .She is compelled, then, to reexamine the so-called great books and make the case for their eternal importance.It is a task that requires not only swimming against the disenchanted march of the post-modern reader into adulthood, but also asserting the unthinkable namely, that great books were written by great men who achieved this status through their own labor and endurance. Hall reintroduces the reader to plato, homer, chaucer, shakespeare, milton and melville and hopes this will expose the fraud of most of contemporary literature, and encourage taste and stamina for the works that...

Re-reading is one of life's joys, anne drury hall reminds us.Not simply from the sweetness of remembering or because of the way a book can