MetaFilter posts tagged with reading and books

where books come to life

lalex — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:10:28 -0800

A beautiful ad for the New Zealand Book Council. (SLYT, via)

Edit, undo me

iamkimiam — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:40:53 -0800

"Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom's beginning to feel a bit iffy. He's overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby's stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie's cervix at 180 beats per minute. 'Help me!' he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting."
This year's worst sex. [NSFW or post-turkey family reading] Also, Flavorpill relives its baddest of the bad: "She moved her hips again and continued to fuck my lights out. I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, the story goes, knew the instant he heard the name Adolf Hitler that he had brushed up against the reason he was born."

The Book I Read

Xurando — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:04:07 -0800

Nina Sankovitch is about to finish reading a book a day for a year. She not only reads them, she reviews them too. "You can’t go from ‘Little Bee,’ by Chris Cleave, which is about this young woman who witnesses torture and herself is a victim of abuse in Nigeria — a really great book, but you’re just crying or your stomach is clenched — to another book like it the next day,” she said. “If I read a book like that every day, I would have collapsed a long time ago.” Other 365 day projects have included this, this, and this.

Wonder what this will do for book sales?

up in the old hotel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:08:44 -0800

Bin Laden's Reading List for Americans “After you read the suggested books, you will know the truth, and you will be greatly shocked by the scale of concealment that has been exercised on you:"

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Previously on Metafilter.
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
According to the translation, “The Apology of a Hired Killer.” The book is said to have been written by “a former CIA agent who lived in two cultures, whose conscience was awakened in his third decade and decided to say the truth despite threats.” While there seems to be no book of that title and description, bin Laden may have been reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins.

But you don't have to take my word for it.

uncleozzy — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:01:50 -0800

Whether you grew up checking out books like Louis the Fish and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie from the library every week, or you just know Steve Horlick's iconic theme song, you're probably familiar with Reading Rainbow, which ends its 26-year run today. Funding has dried up to renew the show's broadcast rights due, in part, to a sea change in the philosophy of teaching reading on television: while Reading Rainbow promoted the idea of reading, some educators today would prefer that programming focus on the mechanics of reading. Others, though, say that the place for such instruction is in the classroom. And although host LeVar Burton left the show in 2007, citing philosophical differences with the program's new owners, Educate, Inc., parent company of Sylvan Learning Centers and Hooked on Phonics, he hints that he's working on adult-targeted webisodes of a similar program. Episodes of Reading Rainbow will still be available for the home and classroom, and there are plans to expand the Young Writers and Illustrators Contest (previously on MetaFilter).

Suggestion

plexi — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:43:22 -0800

I've just finished reading ____________. Type in the name of the book you've just finished, and The Book Seer will provide recommendations for your next read.

...I didn't actually read the link...

Artw — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:06:48 -0800

It’s only natural that if you wish to present yourself as a well-read person, a certain degree of complete bullshit is required. There’s no shame in lying about what you’ve read. There’s only shame in getting caught. Then you look like a doofus, and an illiterate one at that... How to lie about books.

Infinite Summer

mattbucher — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:46:49 -0800

Infinite Summer - "The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009" "You've been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace's masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat." There is also a Twitter account, hashtag (#infsum), and a Facebook group.

What are you reading, charming writer?

mattbucher — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:13:48 -0800

What are writers reading? An eclectic mix of authors answer the perennial question. A sampling of responses: George Packer Anne Fadiman Cass Sunstein Jane Smiley Lydia Millet Steven Zipperstein Abraham Verghese John Dunning Stephen Burt Tim Harford

Telling tales

fearfulsymmetry — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:47:19 -0800

You say Orwell, Tolstoy and Joyce, but actually it's Rowling and Grisham... Anyway if you are a chap, just make sure you put away that Clarkson before your date arrives.

Fetish of ambition

joseph conrad is fully awesome — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:05:15 -0800

"... many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash." A book review of Elaine Showalter's newly published book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, contains a brief historical overview and discussion of the question, "Why can't a woman write the Great American novel?"

Screen Literacy

dhruva — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:22:30 -0800

People of the Screen : "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the screen, not people of the book?"

Nietzsche on your Nokia

desjardins — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:29:27 -0800

Need a little Tolstoy while you're waiting in line? How about some Mark Twain on the subway? Booksinmyphone puts - surprise! - books in your phone, for free.

'Where Forgotton Books are Remembered'

anastasiav — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:13:26 -0800

The Neglected Books Page

Will success spoil Nate the Great?

rikschell — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:48:55 -0800

It happened to Clifford. It happened to Little Bear. It happened to Harold and his Purple Crayon, and Curious George. Now, Moe Greene productions presents, Nate the Great. I don't want to begrudge my favorite children's book authors a fat paycheck, BUT... Is it about the product, or is it about the kids? The classic books remain, but is the brand enriched or is it watered down by "merch?" Whatever happened to teaching kids to read? Some people have their own ideas.

free reading, writing and arithmetic resources

nickyskye — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:11:10 -0800

EduChoices offers some good free stuff online: 25 Places to Read Free Books Online l 50 Online Writing Websites for New Writers l Ranking of 20 Universities that Offer Free Courses Online (with links to the free courses), as well as information about university courses etc. l Great Reference Sites Other Than Wikipedia l Free Linux Tutorials for Beginners l Useful Online Calculators For Almost Every Educational and Life Need. The 10 Most Politically Active College and University Campuses of All Time l other useful links.

Moby Dick? Middlemarch? Jane Eyre?

fiercecupcake — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:28:19 -0800

Humiliation: Which book are you most embarrassed to admit that you have never read? Several "respectable" authors answer the question at the Ways With Words festival. (single-link Telegraph post)

Readers' Travels

Kattullus — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:44:41 -0800

I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.

Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.

Reports of Reading Decline Greatly Exaggerated?

cogneuro — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:13:55 -0800

Are people reading less? Government survey says: yes. Declines in how much and how well people read “are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement.” Also the cause of poor test scores. Steve Jobs agrees: Kindle DOA because nobody reads books anymore. WaPo says 1 in 4 persons read no books in 2006. And children didn't keep reading after they got through Harry Potter, either. So literacy's in a long slow decline.
But wait. The NEA survey has been completely shredded in the blogs; the survey focused on literary reading with a book in your hands, totally excluding anything like, say, spending hours on MeFi. Or, say, reading anything from here. This is odd because the NEA survey placed so much emphasis on whether people read for pleasure. They should check in with the NEH, which is helping to create on-line archives for your reading pleasure. Jobs’s take on the data is challenged here. Some people read a lot of books. ¾ people read at least one. A little self-serving Steve? What about all that reading (and spelling) people need to use your computers? That wouldn’t show up in the survey either. And the widely repeated story about children not reading more after Harry Potter: mostly impressions and “expert” opinion. The only data are about how much children report they read “for fun." After they’ve finished their ton of homework, practiced violin, sent a dozen text messages and updated their MySpace pages. So are people reading less? If book reading is being replaced by other forms of reading it’s bad news for the publishing industry but won’t necessarily make society stupid. Maybe what and how we’re reading is changing, not how much. But you know, that might not be saying much because the baseline is so low: the US comes out poorly in cross-national comparisons of literacy levels. And that's not good.

Self-publishing in an Internet Age, or, Web Comics Without the Pictures.

Caduceus — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:17:28 -0800

Pages Unbound is a portal for serialized web novels, similar to web comic portals such as Buzz Comix and Top Web Comics, if not nearly as fancy. It is a new project by Tales of MU author Alexandra Erin. Note: Tales of MU and some of the novels found on Pages Unbound may be NSFW, as they contain explicit material of various sorts. MU, specifically, is concerned with LGBT issues and racism in a fantasy setting.

"turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book."

amberglow — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:17:56 -0800

The Page 69 Test --inspired by Marshall McLuhan's suggestion to readers for choosing a novel, a new blog, inviting authors to describe what's on page 69. One says: Not the best, but not the worst. If my pages were presidents, I’d put page 69 somewhere in the James K. Polk range.

The future of reading?

sveskemus — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:47:10 -0800

Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to change the way we read. Amazon's new e-book reader, Kindle, is not just a device, it's a service. With EVDO wireless connectivity you can download content to your Kindle any time any place. "This is not your grandfather’s e-book," said one publishing executive to the New York Times. "If these guys can’t make it work, I see no hope."

Read Print.

St Urbain's Horseman — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:40:01 -0800

Read Print. Online books, poems and short stories.

Black and white and read all over

verstegan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:24:46 -0800

The Reading Experience Database is collecting information about 'what British people read, where and when they read it, and what they thought of it' between 1450 and 1945. You can sample the database by searching for reader responses to (e.g.) Shakespeare or Dickens or Karl Marx, or to newspapers in general. It's a collaborative project, open to everyone, so why not contribute?

Enemies of Books!

carsonb — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:27:29 -0800

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.