Tag: books
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Bookception
I’m in the middle of David McCullough’s Truman, a 1,000-page biography (not including the end-matter). Given its girth I figured I’d have to take a break at some point. Sure enough, page 500 rolls around and I get a notification that Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is finally ready for me at the library.…
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Psychedelics and the glow of truth
Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction books, tells the story of four common plants and the human impulses they satisfy: the apple (sweetness), the tulip (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and the potato (control). His new book is How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. Probably because I’ve never done…
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The Big Short in 3 quotes
Michael Lewis, The Big Short: 1. “What needs to be remembered here,” he wrote the next day, after he’d done [the trade], “is that this is $100 million. That’s an insane amount of money. And it just gets thrown around like it’s three digits instead of nine.” 2. “In retrospect, their ignorance seems incredible—but, then,…
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Creativity is the long way
Reading Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, this quote surprised me: Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being. Fully agree.…
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And John Tyler too
When I realized I had yet to read a presidential biography this year, I decided to tackle one that was more obscure and therefore more likely to be shorter. For some reason, tenth president John Tyler came to mind. I opted for John Tyler by Gary May, part of the American Presidents series of short books.…
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Refer Madness: The Book Dropper strikes again
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. A few months ago, a coworker and I noticed that every Tuesday, two items appear on the library’s book sale shelves that shouldn’t be there. The library has a system for what gets placed in the book sale, so we know which items are…
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Today in audiobook opinions
“Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading?” Neurologically, no, but it still counts as reading a book, and is often better than merely reading one. “Portrait of the Voice in My Head” Great profile of “golden-throated” audiobook narrator Grover Gardner and the booming audiobook industry: Gardner’s advice to aspiring narrators is to take…
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Summer assignment: visit your local library
Despite their great intentions, those “required reading” lists of books make me cringe. Required reading usually feels like work, whether they’re from a friend, a professor, or a stranger on the internet. Pleasure reading should be based on freedom and empowerment and whim, not compulsion. Use those lists as a resource, sure, but don’t feel obliged…
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Atlas of a Lost World
We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to…
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The story of a star
This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of…
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Do librarians read all day? Should we?
Librarians and library staff have been fighting the incorrect stereotype (among many others) that their jobs consist of reading all day long. And while I still have programs to plan, books to weed, research questions to respond to, and other things to worry about, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, we took a little time…
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Quisling: What’s in a name?
In July 2016 I visited the Norway Resistance Museum in Oslo, which told the story of Norway’s occupation by the Nazis during World War II. A name that kept popping up throughout the museum was Vikdun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Hitler and seized control of Norway’s government during the occupation. I wanted to…
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A skeptic’s ‘Glance at the Public Libraries’ of 1928, from H.L. Mencken’s ‘American Mercury’
Watch out, world: we’ve got ourselves a 90-year-old hot take! In the June 1928 issue of The American Mercury, a periodical edited by the famous journalist H.L. Mencken, there’s an article by Fletcher Pratt called “A Glance At The Public Libraries”. I stumbled upon the issue while processing material at the Frances Willard House Museum.…
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Reading serendipitously
In an interview, Sven Birkerts talks about how serendipity guides his reading: Any good book will, in the manner of a pool-table bumper, send you angling off to another, and that to another, on and on. The trails are not predictable, they really are serendipitous, but not in the manner of Pandora (“If you liked…
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At the corner of ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ and Typewriter Street
A stately British bookseller and an American writer exchange letters across the pond? Sounds like a cozy English romance novel to me. Turns out 84, Charing Cross Road is neither a novel nor a romance, but a collection of actual letters from over 20 years of correspondence, and it’s delightful. Frank Doel, one of the booksellers…
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How to ‘Win Bigly’? Have no shame
Until about two years ago I knew Scott Adams only as the Dilbert guy. But once he started accurately predicting Donald Trump’s unconventional political path using the lenses of persuasion and hypnotism, gaining critics along the way but scoring on predictions over and over when most everyone else was aghast at Trump’s successes, I figured…
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series on books, movies & more I’ve encountered recently: Nurtured By Love by Shinichi Suzuki. Great little book on how to cultivate talent, specifically in children and music but also for anyone in anything. On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor. Enjoyed the adventure of this winding, informative book on the nature of trails…
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Desire lines in dictatorships
I’m in the midst of Robert Moor’s fascinating On Trails: An Exploration, and he mentions desire lines. Defined as paths “created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal traffic,” they are usually a shortcut through grass that’s a more direct line between two points. “They can be found in the parks of…
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Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era
Got Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era as an unexpected Christmas gift from my dad. Given our shared appreciation for and history in the Northwoods of Wisconsin (though not in lumberjacking or songcatching unfortunately), this was a delightful read. It’s partly a reprint of Franz Rickaby’s 1926 collection Ballads and Songs of…