I bet other drivers thought I was talking on my phone while driving to work this morning as I kept saying to Nick’s narration, “Because you’re an asshole!”
I assumed that I might dislike both the narrators (Nick and his wife Amy), but I’m only on CD 6 and I seriously HATE Nick. Can I finish this book while actively detesting one of the main characters? We shall see. It’s definitely more of a challenge that way.
June reading on Flickr.
My current library book stack.
I understand that multicultural fiction does not exist simply to speak truth to bigotry. And still this is, for me, part of its importance. It is not as good as actually knowing someone, but it is close. If you love Celie or Shug or Kimbili or Sethe, I believe you are going to have a harder time seeing African Americans as “other.” If you experience the love between Jack and Ennis, it is exponentially more difficult to see love between gay people as different from love between straight couples.
Of course, these are often also big, beautiful, breathtaking stories with stunning voices and plots and characterization. But my heart clings to this: It is harder to hate a group of people when you know people from that group.
This is my truth.
Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, recently argued in the New York Times that we ought not to claim that literature improves us as people, because there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy” or other great books.
Actually, there is such evidence. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. This link persisted even after the researchers factored in the possibility that more empathetic individuals might choose to read more novels. A 2010 study by Mar found a similar result in young children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their “theory of mind,” or mental model of other people’s intentions.
nypl:
Is not ridiculously cool, or what? NYPL has partnered with Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Library to provide this outdoor reading room (known as the Library Lawn) on beautiful Governors Island this summer. The pop-up library will be open on weekends starting today, and you can check out books, get library cards, enjoy free programming - it’s basically a branch outdoors, in the sun, with hammocks. So go check it out sometime this summer! Is there really a better way to spend a warm day than with a good book?
I want to go to there.
VIDA isn’t calling for quotas. We don’t want quotas because that’s not how art works. But we do want people to be conscious of their gender bias and we want men particularly to be more open, and women who’ve been trained in a patriarchal system to be open to other voices, because they don’t always realize how parochial their tastes are, or they’re too afraid to like something on their own. Like, oh we all love Cormac McCarthy or, oh we all love Philip Roth. Well I like Cormac McCarthy but I don’t love him and I certainly don’t like Philip Roth, and I’m okay with that. We don’t all think one thing. We should think for ourselves and have a diverse and healthy and dynamic literary setting in this country that isn’t about worshiping a small group of white straight guys that a very small elite group of tastemakers have decided is the shit.
Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book really works. Maybe, then, for a forgetful reader like me, the great task, and the greatest enjoyment, would be to read a single novel over and over again. At some point, then, I would truly and honestly know it.
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting (via azspot)
The problem with reading so many books is that there have been more than a few times that I’ve checked out something from the library and then two or three chapters in, realize I’ve read it before.
A couple months ago I got halfway through Marian Keyes’ Anybody Out There before it hit me I’d read it before. And the first time I read it was recent enough for me to have already scored it on Goodreads! Oops.
(via azspot)
As my head uncluttered, my attention span expanded. In my first month or two, 10 pages of The Odyssey was a slog. Now I can read 100 pages in a sitting, or, if the prose is easy and I’m really enthralled, a few hundred.
I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet | The Verge
Some of us do this even with access to the internet!! Good grief.
It’s no Odyssey, but I finished the 300+ pages of The Chaperone in one day over the past weekend. A hardback from the library no less!
I should note that I thought this guy’s whole leaving-the-internet-for-a-year thing was ridiculous from the get-go. If you want a break from the internet, cut back!
/end rant
Source: theverge.com
Cold Steel publishes June 25, 2013. If you want to catch up to the fabulous readers (and they are fabulous—the MOST FABULOUS) who have already read Cold Magic and Cold Fire and are waiting for Cold Steel, here’s your chance:
Cold Magic TODAY ONLY is on sale at both Kindle and Nook stores for $1.99
(please RT if you so desire)
Bought! (I’ve read it, but had checked a copy out from the library)
That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.
Our own Edan Lepucki judges the opening round of The Morning News’s Tournament of Books — and this match-up is like a Sophie’s Choice.
Boy, do I disagree with the choice made here.
Speaking of speaking Spanish, earlier tonight I found this notebook with vocab words I kept while I was in Peru. Did some real intense soul...
Royal Ascot’s opening day: the Royal Ascot races are a highlight of London’s social calendar. (reuterspictures)
This is...
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