The six ages of book-reading

Ilustração de Emma Schmid

Como leitora ávida e ainda por cima formada em Letras, não teve como não me identificar e dar muitas gargalhadas com o trecho abaixo, do livro Starter for Ten:




I'm meant to be doing an essay on "Nature Imagery in John Donne's Holy Sonnets", but I've been looking for a week now and still can't actually find any.
My pencil-notes in the margin don't help much either; I've written things like "the Annunciation!" and "irony?" and "cf. Freud" and "here he turns the tables!", and I can't remember why, so instead I pick the Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. It occurs to me that there are six ages of book-reading. The first is picture books, then 2) books with more illustrations than words, then 3) books with more words than illustrations, then 4) books with no illustrations, just a map maybe, or a family tree, but lots of dialogues, then 5) books with longs paragraphs and hardly any dialogue, then 6) books with no dialogue, no narrative, just great longs paragraphs and footnotes and bibliographies and appendixes and very, very small writting. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology is very much a book of the sixth kind, and, intellectually speaking, I'm still stuck somewhere between ages four and five. I read the first sentence, flick through in a fruitless search for a map or photo or illustration then fall sleep.