Tag: reading
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Take a look, it’s in the Book Notes
I’ve always enjoyed taking notes on my reading—both fiction and nonfiction—mostly to track factoids and save interesting quotes for reference. For a while those notes lived in a plain text doc, then a Google Doc, then WorkFlowy. After briefly pondering setting up a dedicated subdomain for them and turning each book’s notes into their own…
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Don’t have a reading goal
If you want to enjoy reading, don’t have a reading goal. If you want to read more books by female authors or explore a new genre or something like that, go for it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Once you say “I want to read X number of books this year,” whatever that…
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Trust the turning of pages
Austin Kleon on a recent episode of the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast: I truly believe that with a book, on a sentence to sentence level, I trust the turning of pages. There needs to be a momentum. If you’re turning pages, the book is good, and that includes the trash reading. I do my fair…
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Lifeblood of reading
Alan Jacobs gets to the crux of the ongoing Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, which pits publishers against libraries in the quest to determine who has the right to distribute digital books: Whatever forces are arrayed against libraries are also arrayed against readers. But publishing conglomerates don’t care about readers; they only care about customers.…
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Literacy as a religious act
From the remarkable book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill: “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page,…
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Learning fictions
I’ve been on a fiction reading tear recently. In the last fortnight I’ve finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig—all with a mix of print and audiobook. I just started The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller on…
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Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters
A friend of mine recently moved to northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He said he’d been looking online for information about the region when he stumbled upon mention of an obscure book that was supposed to really capture the area well. It was the short story collection Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters by…
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Hernando Columbus at the Sistine Chapel
Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library is a fascinating book for many reasons. It covers an era of history I’ve rarely visited, so that in itself felt like an adventure. By following the life of Hernando Columbus, the bastard son of…
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When the past isn’t past
Alan Jacobs: If you step back from the endless flow of social media and the internet more generally, and sit down with a book from the past that appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the affairs of the moment, something curious and rather wonderful can happen. Unexpectedly and randomly — stochastically — you…
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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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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…