Personal Pleasures: Reading

Rose Macaulay
1881-1958

As I am always on the lookout for essays about the everyday, I thought I would love this book of thoughts on everything from Armchairs to Fire Engines to Writing published in Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay. I was disappointed. Ms. Macaulay's writing isn't as straightforward as I would have liked and I had difficulty staying engaged. 

This is the opening of her essay on Reading:

Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by tracks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability,  the interdependence,  which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed; we have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems  essays, and what not, but we are never satiate,  we are greedy always for more.