Why read?

"In this book, author Mark Edmundson dramatizes what the recent identity crisis in the humanities has effectively obscured: that reading can change your life for the better. Edmundson's controversial Harper's Magazine article "On the Uses of the Liberal Arts: As Light Entertainment for Bored College Students" has been the most photocopied essay on college campuses over the past five years. Here he picks up where that piece left off." "Edmundson enjoins educators to stop offering condescending analystic technique and facile entertainment and to begin teaching students to read in a way that can…