Hanna Darling reads from Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On January 24th, University Press Books began our second year of Slow Reading Dinners. We were pleased to see several familiar faces from 2010 around the great table. Nick Crump read some “luminous bits” from Joinville’s Chronicles, transporting the assembled to the Near East of the Seventh Crusade. His lovely wife Eleanor treated us to some equally-luminous passages from Peter Ackroyd’s Venice. The bookstore’s own Nicola De Robertis-Theye read from Swann’s Way,translated afresh by Lydia Davis. As an amuse bouche, Chris McCormick followed with two of Davis’ very crisp short stories. New faces also graced the table. Zoe Klippert, author of An Englishwoman in California (Bodelian Library), read from Louis Menand. Cal sophomores Hannah Darling and Prachi Naik also joined us for the first time, lending fresh voices to to some old favorites (One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved, respectively.). Please RSVP for the February dinner, on the 28th. Chef Erick is on sabbatical, so talented chef Maja Gluhovic is stepping in to surprise us with Balkan specialties!

Vincent Gillespie, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor for Medieval Studies this term at Berkeley offers this to our Slow Reading endeavours:

Nietzsche Preface added to the 1886 edition of The Dawn:

I have not been a philologist in vain – perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading… Philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all – to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow – the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. For this very reason philology is now more desirable than ever before; for this very reason it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is intent upon ‘getting things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not ‘get things done‘ so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, published in German 1881, and with a new preface in 1886. This quotation tr. J.M. Kennedy.