For many, the task of reading seems simple enough - indeed you have made it this far. What perhaps you didn’t know, is that by exercising an acute way of reading well, you are initiating a delicate and sublime building of worlds. That beneath the intimate and invisible act, there’s a process that ‘is always a transformation of sensation into sense’.

Philosopher and author Damon Young’s The Art of Reading is a journey into precisely this. It is both an adroit and varied exercise, which examines and celebrates the way we read by delivering a public reflection, on an otherwise private art.

Each chapter is marked by a specific literary virtue: curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, and justice, inspired by an Aristotelean notion of virtue where the right path is the mean of the two extremes. This isn’t meant to evoke the rigorous chambers of academic inquiry, on the contrary, each reference to Schopenhauer’s aestheticism or Iris Murdoch’s cloud of daydreams is mediated by descriptions of a Star Trek addiction, or various reinterpretations of Batman  – the key in reading is to find the mean between excessive indulgence and temperance.

But the work not only displays an ability to weave between philosophy and literature, we must be curious enough to question everything along the way. It was, perhaps, the excessive pride of the orthodox church and not Kazantzakis’ in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ which caused the worked to be condemned in absentia.

There is a genuine curiosity in Young’s reflections on his own bookish childhood influences. And whilst Young himself occasionally treads on his own literary intoxication, ‘I once binged on Dostoyevsky for the buzz of his sweaty, paling protagonists’, if we adhere to his reading of literary justice, we will give pause for judgement and proclamation. There is profundity here, if one has the necessary virtues – in particular patience, to find it.

Robert Frantzeskos