The Pleasures Of Reading In an Ideological Age

Robert Alter is highly intelligent, learned, and Scholarly. This book is very informative yet challenging (i.e., difficult at times) but well worth reading. I love his ending which goes : Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structured common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read; and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.