rajeev sharma

People have started reading less and less over the last few years. Attention span is decreasing. Trying to find good reasons to read - read "Why Read?" by Mark Edmundson (Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia). More at [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/magazine/01WWLN.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091748595-xQvM03HL0VDuDL8lJ2k0iQ] Nytimes[/url]. Overall, though, the effects of reading major authors are almost always good ones. It is virtually impossible to be a consequential literary artist without infusing your work with sympathy. This understanding dates at least as far back as Homer, who makes it a point to depict the Trojans nearly as humanely as he does his fellow Greeks. One of the most moving scenes in ''The Iliad,'' drastically edited in the recent film, ''Troy,'' comes when Hector, fully armored, reaches to embrace his baby son before going into battle. The boy is terrified of the bronzed giant in front of him and cries out. With the greatest tenderness, Hector removes his helmet with its vast horsehair plume. Then he takes hold of his son to say goodbye. Words are potent. Ten years after the fact, people often can't remember a grievous pain: ''Was it the right leg or the left that I broke?'' But a decade on, they'll remember every word and tonal twist of a painful insult. (Robert Frost once suggested that poems should have the force and intensity of rich insults.)