Posts tagged books

Posted 4 months ago

At libraries, children find delight in reading to dogs

“Some had learning disabilities, and their parents wanted them to practice in a nonjudgmental place. Some were learning English and liked reading without having their pronunciation corrected with every word. Some were shy about speaking up in class. And some, like Sean and his sister Mary, love reading and had been looking forward all week to reading to Tavish, a Hungarian vizsla.

“They have so much fun,” librarian Ginny Rawls said. “The kids just light up. It’s really a wonderful program. I can’t say enough good things about it.””

Posted 1 year ago
When I teach literature I always tell them, these would-be writers (we don’t do workshops, we just read great books), I say, “When you read Pride and Prejudice, don’t if you’re a girl identify with Elizabeth Bennet, if you’re a boy with Darcy. Identify with the author, not with the characters.” All good readers do that automatically, but I think it’s helpful to make that clear. Your affinity is not with the characters, always with the writer.
Posted 1 year ago
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful.

David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”  (via ephemerals)

I’m actually 33 now, and wow is this true.

(Source: sometimesagreatnotion)

Posted 2 years ago
At some point towards the end of the book it occurred to me that what I was experiencing could be looked at as a kind of literary variant of the Stockholm syndrome phenomenon, whereby hostages experience a perverse devotion to their captors, interpreting any abstention from violence and cruelty, however brief or arbitrary, as acts of kindness and even love. Psychologically, this is understood as a defense mechanism in which the victim fabricates a “good” side of the aggressor in order to avoid confronting the overwhelming terror of his or her situation. Perhaps I’m stretching the bonds of credulity by implicitly comparing William Gaddis to a FARC guerilla commander, but I’m convinced there’s something that happens when we get into a captive situation with a long and difficult book that is roughly analogous to the Stockholm syndrome scenario. For a start, the book’s very length lays out (for a certain kind of reader, at least) its own special form of imperative—part challenge, part command. The thousand-pager is something you measure yourself against, something you psyche yourself up for and tell yourself you’re going to endure and/or conquer. And this does, I think, amount to a kind of captivity: once you’ve got to Everest base camp, you really don’t want to pack up your stuff and turn back. I think it’s this principle that explains, for example, the fact that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow but gave up halfway through The Crying of Lot 49, when the latter could be used as a handy little bookmark for the former. When you combine this (admittedly self-imposed) captivity with a novel’s formidable reputation for greatness, you’ve got a perfect set of conditions for the literary Stockholm syndrome to kick in.
Posted 2 years ago
One trouble with making Wallace’s art answer to his life—and, even more problematically, to his death—is that we risk ignoring all the other things his work was about. A bigger danger is that each word he wrote starts to look like a symptom in need of diagnosis. Already it’s started happening. Already we’ve seen stories that once bewildered critics with their involutions and opacities spun into transparent allegories of Wallace’s depression and addictions. Already we’ve watched his carefully constructed halls of mirrors razed and rebuilt as glass cathedrals where each of us can bend a knee to the horror of his suffering.
Posted 2 years ago
Posted 2 years ago

ub14:

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer.

— Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (David Lipsky)

Been meaning to read this for a while. Is it worth it?

Posted 2 years ago
Everything about Mr. Ferriss’s book declares: This is not your auntie’s self-help book. No muffled “I’m OK — You’re OK” tone here. The vibe is: I’m Superbad, bro, and I have dimples. You’re a mole person who, if you become an angel investor in my books, might someday touch the hem of my Speedo.
Posted 2 years ago
This is why genre writers cannot claim to have everything. They can take the money and the sales and all that goes with that. And we can sincerely admire them for doing so. But they should not be allowed to get away with suggesting that these things tell us anything about the intrinsic value or scope of their work. Here, for example, is Lee Child talking the kind of ersatz machismo bullshit that so confuses the issue: “The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago. [Is it?] The world was perilous and full of misery, so they wanted the vicarious experience of surviving danger. [Did they?] It’s the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles. [Really? Barnacles?] I could easily write a work of literary fiction. [No you couldn’t.] It would take me three weeks, [No it wouldn’t] sell about 3,000 copies [Doubt it] and be at least as good as the competition. [Absolutely no chance.] But literary authors can’t write thrillers. They try sometimes, but they can never do it. [Crime and Punishment.]
Posted 2 years ago

Google doesn't think Americans are literate

“Seriously! What other possible reason could explain Google Australia and Google England getting a Jane Austen Doodle and Americans geting just the regular old logo?”

Posted 2 years ago

nprfreshair:

thrillhouseisameme:

nprfreshair:

When you superimpose a soccer field on top of NASA’s map, it turns out Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — the entire time they were there — barely crossed 90 yards of moon! What Neil called “a giant leap for mankind” wasn’t quite as giant as it seemed. Oh, the trip was a “leap” to be sure, a fantastic accomplishment, but the first moon explorers explored an astonishingly small area.

A little bit shocking if you think about it. When you think about people landing on the moon you would only assume they took a big look around the place. Guess I was wrong..

Uh, remember this from yesterday? Today, NEIL ARMSTRONG wrote back to explain what happened.

Mary Roach’s Packing For Mars is an excellent (and ultra-readable) book that really makes it clear how amazing an achievement walking on the moon was.

Posted 2 years ago

Reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time

Awesome awesome book.

Posted 2 years ago

nprfreshair:

Linguist Geoff Nunberg weighs in on the recent claim that Jane Austen may have been heavily edited: “She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson — the rules just weren’t settled yet. In fact, it’s pure anachronism to describe any of those things as “wrong” or “incorrect”; it’s like calling Elizabeth Bennet a bachelorette. The modern notion of correctness was a recent invention in Austen’s time, and to people of Austen’s sort it smacked of the schoolmaster and the social climber. My guess is that she would have little use for people who went around clucking their tongues over misplaced apostrophes in grocers’ signs — the sort of pedantry she might put in the mouth of Mr. Collins.”

Posted 2 years ago

rickkanelives:

i snagged this off the shelf when i was at my mom and dad’s in kansas. it was my childhood copy that cost $1.25! i reread it on the plane flight back to LA and it was beautiful. it made me remember why i fell in love with storytelling…and the illustrations by Garth Williams are unbeatable.

This used to be one of my favorite childhood books. And those illustrations are still so beautiful.

Posted 2 years ago
For an hour, Carter sat amid friends and family. With the music playing, and the wine to drink, and a woman with whom he occasionally held hands under the table, this was his last time tonight to relax. It was well known among magicians that a man awaking to love was vulnerable to deadly mistakes.
Carter Beats The Devil - Glen David Gold