Tag: reading
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Bill of Reader’s Rights
I wanna put up these “Rights of the Reader” (from Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader) in my library: 1. The right not to read. 2. The right to skip pages. 3. The right to not finish. 4. The right to reread. 5. The right to read anything. 6. The right to escapism. 7.…
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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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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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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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Nothing to read here
This, from Andy Weir in his By the Book column at the New York Times, seems like an odd thing to say: For the record, my stories are meant to be purely escapist. They have no subtext or message. If you think you see something like that, it’s in your head, not mine. I just…
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Want to Read (∞): on becoming a good reader
I’ve officially become a Reader. Reading books is built into my life, to the point where if I haven’t read anything for a while (a while being a few days) I feel anxious. It didn’t used to be this way. Regularly reading for fun outside of schoolwork wasn’t a concept I grokked until the end…
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Man Bookers
This New York Times story about all-male book clubs was not as inflammatory as I knew it would be taken in certain spheres. It turns out (wait for it…) some men are in book clubs just for men. The reaction from one of the groups to the NYT story is worth reading for important context that didn’t get into…