Schopenhauer proposes ideas about reading and literary and intellectual creation in general, suggestive and incisive, they can not remain indifferent to any reader interested in the intellectual activity.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), one of the most influential European thinkers in the artistic world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several essays devoted to different aspects of reading, literature and intellectual life in general. In both contained in this volume, originally published in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer points out the danger that excessive reading drowns personal creative thinking, advocating that knowledge is sought as an end in itself and not as a means of livelihood, with what a curious eulogy of diletantismo-, attacks specialization to the detriment of universality, defends the need to study ancient languages ​​and read the classics, and runs with wit and originality on many other facets of the world of letters.