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posted by unliteral
on Jan 9, 2012 -
10 comments
What Middletown Read. Robert and Helen Lynd's immersive studies of early 20th century Muncie, Indiana, published as
Middletown (1929) and
Middletown in Transition (1937), are classics of American sociology. Ball State's
Center for Middletown Studies has created a database of the circulation records from the Muncie Public Library from 1891-1902, providing a rare glimpse of the reading habits of turn-of-the-century middle America.
Slate examines the project and what it reveals.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Nov 17, 2011 -
7 comments
The Elusive Big Idea "It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief."
posted by bitmage
on Aug 16, 2011 -
92 comments
Roger Ebert has discovered the Macmillan Reader's Edition of
The Great Gatsby and he hates it:
"This is an obscenity." Macmillan Reader's Editions are
geared to ESL students. Ebert thinks that's a really bad idea: "Why not have ESL learners begin with Young Adult novels? Why not write books with a simplified vocabulary? Why eviscerate Fitzgerald?"
[more inside]
posted by CCBC
on Jul 8, 2011 -
247 comments
Most of us know and love
Dailylit. But, if you want to have more current book snippets emailed to you every day, you can upload your own ebooks to
Dripread.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Jul 3, 2011 -
8 comments
"Reading a novel of punishing difficulty and length is a version of climbing Everest for people who prefer not to leave the house. And people who climb Everest don’t howl with exhilaration at the summit because the mountain was a good or a well made or an interesting mountain per se, but because they’re overawed at themselves for having done such a fantastically difficult thing." Mark O'Connell writes about
how he overcame his fear of reading very long novels.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 18, 2011 -
83 comments
In such a world maximalism and encyclopedism, erudite puzzle solving, simply feel like more of the same, and the last thing we need is more of the same. We need less, much less: we don't need fiction that cultivates the general noise in a slightly more erudite way but still plays by the same rules; we need fiction that strips its way down to our nerves and fibers, simulations that are willing to cut enough of our context away to let us step outside of our own increasingly simulated experience and to see it afresh, from without.—
Brian Evenson, "Doing Without," an essay in The Collagist
(could also be titled "How a mistake in the digital conversion of a Cory Doctorow novel [see difference between print and electronic version] made me think about the meaning of innovative literature") [more inside]
posted by jng
on May 16, 2011 -
10 comments
Recent research on children. (1) Brothers and sisters who argue a lot can improve their language, social skills and outcomes:
Guardian article;
paper on part of the research (pdf). (2) First findings from
Understanding Society. Conclusions include: the unhappiness of children’s mothers with their partners affect children’s happiness, but this is not the case if children’s fathers are unhappy in their relationships; having older brothers or sisters doesn’t appear to affect children’s happiness, but having younger brothers or sisters is associated with less happiness; not living with both natural parents has a greater negative impact on a young person’s life satisfaction than their material situation. (3) A longitudinal study on people now in their forties has found that for these people reading is linked to career success, though not necessarily to better pay, whilst playing computer games and doing no other activities was associated with less likelihood of going to university. In particular, those who owned a ZX Spectrum or Commodore C64 were less likely to go to university.
thinq interview with researcher.
Guardian article.
Telegraph article. (4) Poll about children’s attitudes to losing in sport.
Press release.
Data from children’s survey.
Data from parents’ survey. (All three are PDFs.)
posted by paduasoy
on Apr 9, 2011 -
30 comments
Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, is the paper of record in the science fiction community. Every year the editors and reviewers at Locus publish a recommended reading list which includes novels, YA novels, first novels, anthologies and collections, related non-fiction, art books, and three types of shorter work (
novellas,
novelettes, and short stories). If you are at all interested in the current state of the SF&F genre you can't do better than Locus' yearly effort. The
list for 2010 appears in the February issue.
[more inside]
posted by Justinian
on Feb 18, 2011 -
25 comments
The Suck Fairy. "The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Sep 30, 2010 -
168 comments
Five Books claims to make you an instant expert, which it may or may not. What it does do is interview an important thinker every day about a topic, and have them select five books on the subject. The results are often eccentric and usually fascinating. Some samples:
Rebecca Goldstein on
reason's limitations;
John Timoney on
policing; Calvin Trillin on
memoirs, Marcus du Sautoy on
the beauty of math,
Judith Herrin on
Byzantium, Jonathan Haidt on
happiness, and lots more, including five books on
puppeteering,
Nabokov,
books for kids,
moral philosophy,
video games,
terrorism,
the enemies of Ancient Rome, and
cookbooks.
posted by blahblahblah
on Aug 3, 2010 -
34 comments
The writer has—has been stricken with the—the passion and beauty of life, the world, and a—a demon-driven need to—to express that, to put it down on paper or cut it into marble or into music, and with that foreknowledge that he has only a limited time to do it, he may be dead tomorrow—he's got to do it all while he can still breathe, and it's a—a desire, a need, to put the whole history of the human heart into any and every word, every paragraph that he writes, and the obscurity comes from a belief which I hold, that—that there is no such thing as "was."
In the late 1950s William Faulkner was
writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia.
Extensive recordings of readings, reflections, and classes are now online.
NPR summarizes.
[more inside]
posted by jjray
on Jul 15, 2010 -
15 comments
Last August (2009), the "ephemeral artists" of
Nothing Happened Here staged a
mobile public reading event,
meandering around the town of San Luis Obispo, CA with
The Reading Chair, and a group of folks reading
a variety of stories, poems and tales. The group has planned
Typing in Public to take place tomorrow (May 15, 2010), in the same little town. The event is primarily focused on
people writing on typewriters around town, but people can also share comments via
Twitter,
Flickr, or texting the event coordinators. To spark some inspiration, the group has received submissions from a variety of people, including
Gerald Casale for
Devo,
Paul Frommer writing in
Na'vi (with translation to English),
Dr. James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, University Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, writing on
the library as the poster child of the it revolution, and plenty more.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 14, 2010 -
8 comments
Anglo-Saxon Aloud: Daily readings (and podcasts) from the Complete Corpus of Anglo Saxon Poetry, presented by Prof. Michael Drout, Wheaton College. For those that like to read along, the Corpus presented in
text (no translation, though).
posted by Chrischris
on Mar 20, 2010 -
18 comments
Picture Book Report is an extended love-song to books. Fifteen illustrators will reach out to their favorite books and create wonderful pieces of art in response to the text that has moved them, shaped them, or excited them. From sci-fi to children’s books to fantasy to serious novels, we’ll cover them all. For three weeks out of every month there will be a new illustration every day from one of us along with our thoughts, process, anything we can come up with. Together we will try to excite readers both new and old and capture some of that magic of storytelling..
[more inside]
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew
on Feb 15, 2010 -
12 comments
