Reading Matters: How Literature Influences Life

Great literature informs, absorbs attention, and sparks epiphanies. These works provide the true north of our literary compass, and take us further and further on our intellectual, emotional and spiritual journey. Among other experiences in reading literature, you find delight and joy, profound depths of previously unrelated thought, and vast fields of human relationships. Reading great literature can bring moments of insight, revelation, and changes of perspective that allow us to rethink our assumptions, belief system and worldview.

In other words, to read is to be more fully able to understand the human condition. It is evident that we become what we read. Each chapter in Reading Matters explores aspects of the human condition: moral responsibility, redemption, spirituality, state governance and governance of the self, and a sense of time and of place. Some readers may know many of the texts in the book, others some of the texts, and yet others none at all. But all readers will be aware of the facets of the human condition contained in the works. Many will find in this book a new avenue for accessing literature, while others gain easily accessible philosophical ideas and psychological understandings.

Janet Levine’s first work Inside Apartheid earned media attention throughout the United States. She is also the author of The Enneagram Intelligences, nominated for the 2002 Grawemeyer Education Award. Levine is the founder and leader of several successful non-profit organizations in South Africa and the US.