The Common Reader

I believe in the power of serendipity in the reading life. While browsing in a Barnes & Noble in Montgomery this week, I came across a marvelous book called EX LIBRIS by Anne Fadiman. This is a neat little book of personal essays by the author on reading.

In the book the author makes reference to an essay by Virginia Woolf called "The Common Reader." The bookstore had this Virginia Woolf volume. Wolfe describes what she calls the common reader. I quote from Woolf's essay because this describes me. I am a common reader in the Virginia Woolf sense.

"The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the scholar and the critic. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or to correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole---a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are to obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honors, then, perhaps, it may be worthwhile to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so might a result."

So now I see my place. I am a common reader.