Sherry has a long list of reading lists from various sites, plenty of material to inspire, ignore, or distain. If I was anywhere near a decent blogger, I would pick out titles I knew nothing about and mock whoever it is recommending them. But, no. I must move on.
And since we’re on the subject of Patrick Henry College, Marvin Olasky at the World Magazine blog quotes from a recent interview with Dr. Ben Carson, who answered the question of a Patrick Henry student about whether any teacher had especially helped him to attain success.
He tells a story that resonates with me, because I had a similar experience. He thought he was the dumbest guy in the class until one day when a teacher asked a question and an amazing thing happened:
Everybody was staring at me. They could not believe all this geological information spewing forth from the mouth of a dummy. But I was probably the most amazed person because it dawned on me at that moment that I wasn’t stupid.
I realized the reason I know all that information is because I was reading books. I said to myself, “Aren’t you tired of being called a dummy?” I said, “What if you read books about all your subjects? Can you imagine what the effect would be?” And from that point on, no book was safe from my grasp.
Biographer Jonathan Rogers is hosting discussion on stories by Flannery O’Connor all summer. See the reading list here. The first story is up this week, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
I know scientists of all stripes choose to study things that may seem obvious to us in order to thoroughly understand why they happen, but somehow this one seems like a high school science fair project. A researcher “suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing.” Yes. Yes, they can be.
In other research news, people will judge a body by his facial hair. An online poll shows the soul patch and chinstrap beard are the most offensive.
The Art of Manliness recommends that men read fiction for cognitive development. They say most men stick to non-fiction.
While many men have stacks of books accumulating on their “to-read” pile, chances are that pile is composed primarily of non-fiction tomes. For the past 20 years or so, the publishing industry has noted a precipitous decline in the number of men reading fiction. Some reports show that men make up only 20% of fiction readers in America today.
They list a few reasons for men sticking to non-fiction, but not the one I’m most familiar with. I’ve heard most often that men want to read something true or that which they perceive as productive. Fiction, they would say, is just escapism.
But fiction reading, AoM reports, will improve your creativity, empathy, and theory of mind among other things.
An editor talks about how J.K. Rowling’s books opened up the world of children lit, and he strays into how nice he thinks it would be to have fewer books printed.
Roger Sutton says we’re pressed to believe children don’t want to read, but they are “reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes ‘real reading’ as defined by ‘real readers’—mainly teachers and librarians.”
On the future of print publishing, he says, “Every author in this room is going to disagree with me on this, but there are too many copies of too many books being published. A little curation would be a good thing.” So if libraries were the place to go for holding a book in your hand, then we would have a sane publishing world. Is he ignoring home libraries, or does the future have room for that?
Is there a literary canon of books everyone who considers himself educated or maybe civilized should read? I mean, everyone reads Pookie and the Moonlight Vularoo, but what about the stuff teachers put on assigned reading lists?
D.G. Myers talks about personal Best Of lists here, saying the idea of books everyone should read is a quaint throwback to the 20th century. “If literature is no longer a part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it,” he writes.
Myers also culls together a list of top authors according to how much has been written about them by scholars. Henry James and William Faulkner top the list.
Al Mohler laments the passing of the printed Britannica. “My guess is that, all things being equal, a boy my age riding along in the family’s Prius this summer is more likely to be playing Angry Birds on his iPad. Left behind is the unexpected serendipity of reading about the mating habits of aardvarks. Is this progress?”
Heh, he has a point, though it would be better served by another example, don’t you think?
John Plotz describes what’s in a database called What Middletown Read, “the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902.”
“It’s possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible, while missing the whole point of the Bible. It’s entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story,” writes Tullian Tchividjian.