The joys of unstructured reading

The Internet Monk has a post on being an eccentric reader that I completely identify with (except that I can’t claim my reading has been so consistenlty Christ-focused). When I was an undergrad (and a grad student for that matter) I spent more time than I probably should’ve reading things that were only tangentially related (at best) to my classwork. There was something exhilirating about reading something that led you on to something else, or simply browsing the stacks at the university library and picking up something that looked interesting. I remember once sheepishly admitting to a professor of mine who was a hardcore analytic philosopher that I had actually spent time reading the likes of Josiah Royce, Henri Bergson, and Jacques Maritain! Whether this helps account for my being an academic washout I leave to the reader.