"Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false. It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire."This is NOT a how-to book, but three essays exploring and thinking the subject through. What does an authentic voice feel like, sound like? How can you hear it -- or not -- in others. Everyone should have to read this in high school.P.S. Forgot to mention that my one complaint about this book is Alvarez's obvious issue with the Romantics. Not only does he misrepresent them, he even lumps them together with Victorian and Gothic authors. For a more accurate picture of the Romantics, see [a:Richard Holmes|31054|Richard Holmes|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1249593642p2/31054.jpg]."...the altogether subtler sense of being emotionally awakened...""...the fragile defenses society has built to keep out chaos...""What is sometimes passed off as 'fine writing' -- also known as 'poetic prose' -- is usually little more than a set of secondhand stylistic devises that cost the writer nothing and flatter the readers into believing that, through it, they have graduated into a better class of literature.""Art is about more than compensation or self-therapy... to make you... more fully and pleasurably alive."[a:Richard Holmes|31054|Richard Holmes|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1249593642p2/31054.jpg]
