Antonio Muñoz Molina: “Reading is the only sovereign act we have left”

“Reading is the only sovereign act we have left,” Antonio Muñoz Molina once said. The phrase places reading at the meeting point of politics and private life, treating it as more than a way to receive a story or pass the time.

Its central idea is inner freedom. No one can read for another person, or completely dictate what that person imagines, connects or discovers while reading. In a world crowded with messages, screens, slogans, noise and speed, reading requires a deliberate choice: to step away, concentrate, enter another voice and sustain an attention that does not depend on an algorithm or an outside emergency.

That is why reading can be understood as a sovereign act. For the duration of a book, a person regains some control over the mind. The line appeared as the headline of a 1989 interview with El País, where Muñoz Molina defended reading and the novel against simplifications and cultural fashions.

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Reading is the only sovereign act we have left.

Read today, the phrase carries even greater force in the article’s telling. Reading may look like a small gesture, but it becomes a form of resistance against distraction, manipulation and haste. The reader chooses to enter a different kind of time, and that choice contains a measure of freedom.

Muñoz Molina, born in Úbeda, Jaén, in 1956, has been a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1996. His novels include The Winter in Lisbon, Beltenebros, The Polish Rider, Plenilune, Sepharad and In the Night of Time. He received the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and has also worked as a columnist and essayist. Memory, cities, history, reading and responsibility in the use of words recur throughout his work.

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the depth and brilliance