Everyday Purpose
One might make a most basic distinction between motives for reading: on the one hand, reading to escape oneself, on the other, reading to discover one’s purpose in life. The former is well addressed at newsstands. There is pleasure in buying a paperback before a journey, in involving ourselves in a story of ten generations in a Southern American town or in the quest to find the murderer of a CIA agent decapitated in an Internet café. Once we’ve boarded a carriage, we can abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different world, breaking off to take in the passing scenery, while holding open our volume at the point where a detective has shot off a gun, or a farmhand has kissed the heroine – until our destination is announced, and we re-emerge into reality.
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