This essay reflects on the joy of reading through personal experience, highlighting its impactful elements.
This essay reflects upon the adventure of reading by thinking back to the day when, at age ten, the author read Tolkien’s Hobbit in one long, uninterrupted sitting. Based on that memory, the essay proposes a model of ecstatic reading that has everything to do with the pleasure of plot, of surprise, reversal, and (in Tolkien’s sense) eucatastrophe.
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Charles Hatfield (2025) studied this question.
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