Do you give a book a certain amount of time, or a certain number of pages, before giving up? Do you never give up? How do you decide? Read more
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Tag: Reading
How to Fall Back in Love With Reading
Whatever you need to do to reestablish a reading habit is a net benefit, and that should extend to what you read, too. That might require divorcing yourself from the notion that books have to be important or educational to be legitimate. “Just give yourself permission to read whatever you’re interested in reading.” Read more
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The Cruel Practice of Banning Books Behind Bars
Across the United States, agencies have issued an ever-evolving list of restrictions on what people in prison can read. Works by Black authors, civil rights literature, critiques of mass incarceration, books in languages other than English—all are frequently censored. (Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and books by David Duke have been allowed in some of those same prisons.) Read more
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The Power—and Necessity—of Reading Dangerously
Authors are not infallible. Each great writer is the child of her or his age, certainly. But the miraculous aspect of great books is their ability to both reflect and transcend the prejudices of the author as well as their time and place. It is this quality that allows a young woman in twentieth-century Iran to read a Greek man named Aeschylus, who lived thousands of years ago, and to empathize with him. Reading does not necessarily lead to direct political action, but it fosters a mindset that questions and doubts; that is not content with the establishment or the established. Fiction arouses our curiosity, and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, this desire to know that makes both writing and reading so dangerous. Read more
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Reading Books About… People Reading Books?
…the best biblio-memoirs are a wonderfully quirky mix of autobiography, travel writing, literary criticism, self-help and immersion journalism. The list that follows includes books which push the genre boundaries, which explore and explode the form. So often books stay in our head precisely because we do not know exactly what they are. Read more
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