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Posts tagged reading
I’m currently reading:
BEAUTIFUL SOULS: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times
Eyal Press
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“In his book Obeying Orders, the legal scholar Mark J. Osiel argues that soldiers steeped in traditional notions of military honor are more likely to resist unjust orders than conscripts with more jaundiced attitudes. He cites the case of an officer who learned of a recruit caught aiming his gun at the head of a Vietnamese woman and snapped, ‘Marines don’t do that.’ In Osiel’s view, professional pride and military idealism may prove a more effective constraint on soldiers thrust into morally compromising situations than abstract legal norms.”—Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls, p. 94
Emphasis mine.
By Joe Tone
January 23, 2012
America’s librarians, in town for a big conference, had descended on the downtown cantina [Dallas’ Wild Salsa] in force, and the waiting area was a dense sea of lovable nerd. The dining room was loud and packed, too, and the staff looked like they’d been hit by a really well read tsunami … By the time we left, the librarians were gone, and the place looked to have survived—more stray glasses scattered about than you typically see, but intact. A bartender was tidying up as I walked out.
“Did the librarians drink all your tequila?” I asked him.
He looked exhausted.
“Damn near.”
The Joy of Books
Many sleepless nights were spent moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto to create this video.
(via Sarah Moran)
1,455 notes (via bookshelfporn)
Books That Made a Difference to Amy Poehler - Oprah.com
As told to Mamie Healey
May 2009
When I was growing up, I was a voracious reader; I loved sitting in my house and jumping into new worlds. But more important, I loved meeting new people. Reading was a way to make friends or enemies, a way to discover how all these different people exist in the world and to rub shoulders with them. The ability to feel as if you’ve met someone, as if that person exists in flesh and blood and that you relate to them somehow, makes you feel a lot less lonely. And it also makes you feel very brave. When you read stories about triumph and about struggle and people coming to terms with how scary life is, you begin to think, “What could I take? What could I do? What would I do in that moment?” … Good characters are complex; they continue to change. Just when you think you’ve got them in your hand, they slip away. But they keep you reading, keep books interesting, and, maybe, make you more compassionate.
“Now That Books Mean Nothing.” — Nell Boeschenstein, The Morning News
Clicking through YouTube clips occasionally has led me to scroll through the comment threads below. This is reading material I can manage … These are the things—thoughts, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages—I have the stamina to roll my eyeballs over: there are the inevitable Facebook and Twitter feeds, which occasionally lead me to articles I can or cannot finish. There are the pieces of paper I get from the hospital that say in all caps in the upper right-hand corner, “Explanation of Benefits/This Is Not a Bill”; in the box that holds the dress I bought for job interviews and which I shipped to Virginia from a boutique on Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, there is a note from the shop girl saying she hopes I feel better soon and good luck; there are orderly lists of when and which medications I have taken; there are job listings that arrive in my inbox from Indeed and Idealist with infuriating regularity each morning and which I peruse before deleting because the jobs are all in New York and New York is no longer where I want to be; there are text messages and emails from friends and there are online shopping descriptions (“The gilded glass creations of Tamara Childs are sold in some of the world’s finest galleries…”). There are get-well cards that arrive via snail mail on old-fashioned paper and addressing me in old-fashioned handwriting from people who assure me I can do this and stroke my sense of vanity for being brave.
There is also the pamphlet my doctor gave me two weeks after surgery and just before I left New York. It’s called “Exercises After Breast Surgery.” It is 13 pages long, with large type, illustrations, and plenty of air between the lines of its paragraphs.
By Rick Poyner
When working on a post, I look forward to planting links that will shoot their tendrils outwards from the text. I want the links to be truly useful and I spend time trying to pick good ones. I work on the basis of an idealized image of a super-motivated reader who will be so committed to the subject that she will want to pursue every lead I can offer.
…
The signs are that many of us struggle these days to read in a concerted, attentive and linear fashion. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that we have become incredibly adept at flitting from one thing to another, filtering, selecting and absorbing little bursts of information as we go. The screen environment, with its many competing nodes of interest, encourages this kind of scanning and scavenging … Carr talks about the F-shaped reading pattern revealed by eye-tracking studies. The eye sweeps across the top part of the reading material and then it moves down and does the same thing again. After that is just tails off feebly down the left side. A bit of scanning is still going on, but reading has stopped. Any second now the fidgety, reluctant viewer will probably zip off to an ad, check out a tweet, or click on a link.
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