Category Archives: Reading

Reading, Uncategorized

River of Books in the Street

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In Toronto, they throw books in the street and call it art to make a statement about congested traffic.

“We want literature to take over the streets and conquer public spaces, freely offering those passersby a traffic-free place which, for some hours, will succumb to the humble power of the written word.”

They laid down this artistic installation on one of the city’s busiest streets.

“Thus, a city area which is typically reserved for speed, pollution and noise, will become, for one night, a place for quietness, calm and coexistance illuminated by the vague, soft light coming out of the lighted pages.”

During the exhibit, people walked on the books, took pictures of themselves on the books, and took most of the books home with them. I don’t know whether Toronto’s traffic congestion has changed since receiving this smite from the humble word.

Poetry, Reading
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“Literature,” writes Caleb Griego, an editor for The Heights, the student newspaper of Boston College, “seems to soothe the discontents of the mind. Reading allows for us to come away from our own loneliness and relish in the solidarity of it with another. Our alienation is both the cause of anguish and the remedy to it.”

Reading, Uncategorized

We Can Burn Books, So Why Not Teachers?

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“We train as researchers but spend our days managing the emotions of late adolescents, haggling over budgets, and figuring out how to use Moodle’s gradebook,” writes Jonathan Malesic, who used to teach at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before he burned out.

“Eventually, I came to dread every class meeting.”

He describes his experience and some lessons learned.

Chronic dislocation produces the three main components of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of professional ineffectiveness. Burned-out professors, then, are people who cannot muster the strength to do the intellectual labor of their job, who see students as problems, and who feel their work has no positive effect.

Introverted teachers and students appear to be at greater risk for burnout in increasingly social learning environments. English teacher Michael Godsey tells this story:

After 11 years of teaching English at a public high school, Ken Lovgren left the profession, mostly because he was drained by the insistent emphasis on collaboration and group work. Engaging in a classroom that was “so demanding in terms of social interaction” made it difficult for him to find quiet space to decompress and reflect. “The endless barrage of ‘professional learning community’ meetings left me little energy for meaningful interaction with my kids,” he told me.

Publishing, Reading

Google Is Reading to Expand Its Mind

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Researchers at Google Brain are having their artificial intelligence read 11,000 novels to improve its sense of language.  At least one author thinks that a weird idea and wonders why she wasn’t asked for her permission before her book was used. The books used were supposedly unpublished and free for download. Should a company like Google be expected to pay for the books its machine reads, or does it matter since the books were all available as free downloads?

Another question we might ask is whether reading all these books will help Google drive better.  It’s language translation skills are definitely improving.

Reading

How Can I Read When I Have No Time?

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My wife and I do not have cable, so we have picked up the practice of slowly plodding through books by reading them aloud to one another. We don’t place elaborate or super intense goals on how fast or how many books we read. We just choose a book, begin reading, and then finish whenever we finish.

Sam Bierig, who has a fairly busy schedule, recommends this and five other tips for consuming more books in the time you have, including reading a few books at a time. He says it helps to read a couple small books while plowing through a large one. What do you think? How do you squeeze reading, which includes listening to audiobooks, into a busy schedule?

Reading

Reading in Parking Lot Seen as Suspicious Behavior

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A thirty-three year old, former high school English teacher spent a couple hours at Stonehaven Wharf, “a parking lot for fishing boats that’s frequented by tourists to the Canadian province of New Brunswick,” according to the Washington Post. He sat in his small white hatchback, reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity and a book by Tim Keller.

On his way home, he was pulled over by Canadian police, because someone had reported his behavior as suspicious. Of course, the officer quickly saw there was nothing suspicious about the Hamilton, Ontario native, and wished him well. The driver said:

I do not know the true motivations behind the individual who called the police to report my presence at the Stonehaven Wharf, but I struggle to understand why my actions of driving my vehicle to a public space, reading a book, and never once exiting my vehicle was cause for a level of suspicion which prompted this individual to call the police.

Non-fiction, Reading

Read the Bible in Whole Books

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When we change the Bible into a chapter and verse Bible, plus added all these other modern additives — cross references, section headings, footnotes, all the other stuff that we put in Bibles — we have really made it hard for people to just flat out read the Bible. And one of the things I contend in my book is we should be reading first and studying second and actually doing our study in the context of having read whole books, because that is really what authors intended. Their central unit is not a verse, is not a chapter, it is a book.

Tony Reinke of Desiring God talks to Glenn Paauw, the Executive Director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading, on how the Bible came to be designed the way it is today. Paauw says practical considerations simply built on each other so that while we’ve done much to help people reference the Bible, we’ve also hindered them from simply reading it.

Reading, Writing

Developing a Writing Mindset

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Here are two posts with some good thoughts on developing a writing mind.

Shannon Stewart explores the wisdom behind her friend’s recommendation, “If you want to write fantasy, you’re going to have to stop reading only fantasy.”

Anne Janzer describes a couple binary mindsets, fixed vs. growth and abundance vs. scarcity, and how they restrict or encourage a would-be writer.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

What Americans Claim to Read

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Last week, the Library of Congress opened a new exhibit called “America Reads” to “celebrate the public’s choice of 65 books by American authors that had a profound effect on American life.”

It’s a follow-up to the 2012 exhibit “Books That Shaped America.” At that time, “the Library of Congress urged members of the public to name other books that shaped America and to tell the Library which of the 88 books on the list were most important to them. Thousands of readers responded.”

We, the people of these United States, chose books such as Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, both Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Anthem, The Book of Mormon, Stephen King’s The Stand, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Cat in the Hat, AA’s Big Book, The Feminine Mystique, and Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

The LOC reminds us, “The volumes featured in the ‘America Reads’ exhibition do not necessarily represent the best in American letters, nor do they speak to the diversity of our nation and the books it produces.” No, but it does speak to the type of people who visit the Library of Congress and respond to reading surveys with what amounts to Boaty McBoatface without the priceless publicity.

The Big Book? Baby and Child Care? How many actual people who put on pants in the morning responded to this survey? It couldn’t be thousands, unless almost everyone picked a unique title, making the three votes for Baby and Child Care a standout choice.

The exhibit will run through the end of the year.

Fiction, Reading

The Invasion Will Come by Hot-Air Balloon

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Floating in outer space

Nancy Hightower offers a  list of best sci-fi/fantasy books of 2015.

About this time last year, io9 offered this list of the year’s anticipated books. Compare that list to this one from Valentina Zannoni.