On Reading

Thoreau kept the Iliad on his table through his first summer at Walden and barely opened it. Then he wrote a chapter insisting that real reading is among the hardest things a person can do, and most of what passes for reading is not it. This one is personal. Kaag hated books until his mother sat him down at the kitchen table, and he will tell you what she did there. Then the streak in this chapter that is hard to like, Thoreau the snob, and whether the charge holds up. The episode ends at the university, Kaag's own industry, which he is not sure he can defend.