Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Borges frames reading as a pursuit of pleasure rather than duty. By calling himself a “hedonistic reader,” he rejects reverence for books based solely on age, reputation, or canonical status, and instead privileges the immediate aesthetic experience—wonder, beauty, intellectual delight—that literature can produce. His dismissal of “commentaries and criticism” is not necessarily anti-intellectual; it signals impatience with secondary discourse when it eclipses the primary encounter with the text. The remark aligns with Borges’s broader tendency to treat literature as a living labyrinth of sensations and ideas, where the reader’s enjoyment and imaginative response matter more than scholarly apparatus or cultural obligation.