Anonymous (3)

Dublin Core

Title

Anonymous (3)

Description

The marathon reading, shall we say, taps the brakes on that larger "Netflix and chill" inevitability-- inviting contemporary anthropoi to come out of their media-soaked stupor and sit and to read a mid-19th century novel-- one written for the human voice-- together. As we saw in February with The Old Curiosity Shop reading, it's obviously retro and not at all everyone's cup of tea-- but it's also entirely radical. Like reading a novel at all, there's no world-altering reason to do it, and that space away from our quantifio-instrumental rationales for life may be its strongest suit. For the sheer seductive pleasures of the textual moment, for the gorgeous delights of inhabiting imagined other selves and other worlds, for the delicious sensualities of slowness, of imagination, and for the gradual accretion through humor, parody, and plot of moral sense-- for such things, there's nothing like a novel and nothing at all like reading it together, aloud, every word, all the way through, without stopping.