The nineteen ways I’ve read

I have read
speedily like a bright young fool,
crabbily like a teacher,
querulously like a scholar,
wistfully like a traveller,
and punctiliously like a lawyer.

I have read
selectively like a politician,
comparatively like a critic,
contemptuously like a tyrant,
glancingly like a journalist,
competitively like an author,
laboriously like an aristocrat.

I have read
critically like an archaeologist,
microscopically like a scientist,
reverentially like the blind,
indirectly like a poet.

Like a peasant I have read carefully,
like a composer attentively,
like a schoolboy hurriedly,
like a shaman magically.

We are all children in the art
of reading. We assume there is
only one way to read a book. But
a book read in a new way becomes -
a different book

This piece is an adaptation from Ben Okri’s 2016 Don Quixote and the ambiguity of reading.

Dream intentionally - while you’re awake.

(A little reminder too - if you click on the ‘view in browser’ link at the top of my email you’ll be magically transported to my ghost site - the text is the same AND you’ll see this week’s featured Unsplash photographic artist.)