Philip Graham on Craft and Reading

A beautiful essay on reading, emotional stress, and War and Peace:

“One day in seventh grade I ordered my usual stack of books from the Scholastic Books Service; one of them was an abridged version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  A little skeptical, I figured I could skip past the peace parts if they proved too boring.  When the nine or so books I’d ordered finally arrived I saved Tolstoy’s novel for last—even abridged, the book was 500 pages long, longer than any book I’d ever read before.  But its length was not the challenge, not in the way the vocabulary of Henry Huggins had been for me years ago. The challenge was of an entirely different order.” https://themillions.com/2010/04/every-day-i-open-a-book.html

Also–selected crafted posts from Graham:
https://www.philipgraham.net/selected-craft-posts/