I really can't recommend Fadiman's two books of essays, "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader" and "At Large and At Small" highly enough. I have a whole shelf of books about books and reading, and those are two of my favorite things on it.
My entirely solipsist philsophy of reading is that I take the view that gets me the best to read. That means that I ignore Dorothy Sayers' horrible handling of Jewish characters and blame it on the times, for love of rest of her work, but give Mark Twain credit for being anti-racist in the context of *his* times. Because Huck Finn and Gaudy Night are great books and I don't want to deprive myself of either. It's a little harder to ignore with living authors; I'm at the point where I'm not likely to be seeking out anything new by Orson Scott Card. But if I feel like rereading a copy I already own of Alvin Maker, I'll appreciate it for what's in it, not what Card said outside the book.
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My entirely solipsist philsophy of reading is that I take the view that gets me the best to read. That means that I ignore Dorothy Sayers' horrible handling of Jewish characters and blame it on the times, for love of rest of her work, but give Mark Twain credit for being anti-racist in the context of *his* times. Because Huck Finn and Gaudy Night are great books and I don't want to deprive myself of either. It's a little harder to ignore with living authors; I'm at the point where I'm not likely to be seeking out anything new by Orson Scott Card. But if I feel like rereading a copy I already own of Alvin Maker, I'll appreciate it for what's in it, not what Card said outside the book.