Reading Minds

Books have the power to change a person: to make them braver, to define their life path, to help cope with loneliness, and to navigate through an incomprehensible world. German writer Veronika Reichl discusses how this happens based on interviews with readers of high literature—from the works of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze to the books of Roland Barthes, Clarice Lispector, and Milan Kundera. To understand the texts of thinkers, people seek connections between theory and sensory experience, randomly select fragments and copy them by hand, read only while traveling, engage in dialogue with the author, leave notes in the margins, and highlight what they agree with or, conversely, are ready to passionately argue about. “Reading Minds” is a guide to the perception of complex texts, a navigator into the world of thinking, and an exciting story about how books help us meet ourselves.