La experiencia de leer

Since its publication in 1961, this small study on the experience of reading has not stopped being reissued to the point of becoming a classic. In it C. S. Lewis proposes an "experiment" that proceeds in reverse of what is usual in literary criticism: "judging literature by how people read it", not from a classification between "good" and "bad" books, but between "good" and "bad" readers. Reading habits and the prejudices associated with them, the different ways of reading and the different satisfactions -certain or illusory, disinterested or selfish- that each one obtains from the experience, are subjected to an enthusiastic and heterodox analysis, which he manages to expose with humor, amenity and brilliance, without the need to fall into terminological obscurantism, the primordial idea that "regardless of the value of literature, this is only verified at the time and place in which a good reader reads". The reader to whom everything seems "slow", the one who looks for "truths" about life, or the one who reads only to take a prestigious bath are some of the models that this essay reviews, a pleasure for everyone one who loves books and still today a new and unique perspective.