Book critic David Ulin complains in the 9 August Los Angeles Times that a body just can’t find quiet time to read anymore, and calls the solitary act of reading a “lost art.” He quotes Simone Weil—”without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are”—but he should have [...]
Entries Tagged as 'reading'
Concentration Artists
October 21st, 2009 1 Comment
Tags: Cicconi · concentration · NEA · Peter · reading · Ulin
Crushed
October 18th, 2009 6 Comments
The author crush. One of the many varieties of crushes a person can experience, and particularly powerful to those of us who fancy ourselves writers. We all know we have them. One book, one sentence, even just one turn of phrase takes a reader from being appreciative to being awe struck to wanting to [...]
Tags: author crush · Chuck Thompson · Llalan · Pico Iyer · reading · writers
October 17 events
October 14th, 2009 No Comments
Above photo courtesy of essygie from Flickr Creative Commons
Stuart Weisberg on Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman
Location: Harvard Bookstore
Time: 4 pm
Alex R. Goldfeld on The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhoods
Location: North End Branch Library
Time: 12 pm
Tags: author readings · books · bookstores · Independent bookstores · nonfiction · reading
The Pile of Books on My Floor -or- Summer Guilt
July 14th, 2009 2 Comments
This is the unsteady tower growing next to my bed. The crab and almost empty box of Godiva chocolates notwithstanding, it is all books and journals I have not yet read–well, those that I don’t have room for on the shelves. Initially, I thought this would be summer reading.
At the very bottom, the beginning and [...]
Tags: books · literary magazines · Llalan · reading · reading habits
Rare Books, Indecipherable Texts, Precious Metals
July 11th, 2009 No Comments
This week, apparently, is travel writing week, but you don’t have to leave town. Thanks to literature, you don’t even have to leave your house to travel, inwardly at least. However, I’d like to recommend a book that’s well worth a trip to the library.
It’s called the Codex Seraphinianus, and is very mysterious. I learned [...]
Summer Reading: Lounging with Lolita
June 14th, 2009 3 Comments
The Washington Post recently asked several authors which fictional characters would make the best beach buddies. Here are some of my favorite responses:
After some vacillating, Christopher Buckley decides: “I think I’ll go with Magwitch, the escaped convict from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. He’d have some fantastic stories to tell, and, as we know, he knew [...]
Tags: Jill · reading · summer reading
Recommended Reading (according to Neil Gaiman and some others)
June 11th, 2009 No Comments
I don’t really like to re-post things from around the internet unless it’s particularly interesting, and I this counts in my opinion, plus it continues our theme of summer reading. Last week, Salon.com asked a bunch of authors what they were reading and what they would recommend. Even though some of the books/subject mentioned don’t [...]
Tags: literary taste · patrick · reading · reading habits · Summer Reading Month · writers · writers' habits
Leisure Reading (again!)
May 7th, 2009 3 Comments
Hey Old Sports, it seems like it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, but here I amAt the end of last term, I wrote a post about leisure reading and how the end of the term means being able to read the books I want to read (instead of class reading, obviously). Well it’s that time [...]
Tags: literary magazines · patrick · reading · reading habits
Life Lessons from Books
April 16th, 2009 No Comments
In Roy Kamada’s Pacific Scatterings: Asian Diaspora class that I’m currently taking, one of the common themes throughout all the readings is the construction of identity. Now, of course, there are an uncountable number of forces working around us, shaping the people we will become, whether we know it or not.
All this talk of why [...]
Tags: books · emerson courses · literary taste · patrick · reading · reading habits