I meant to link to this earlier. Britannica has coordinated a talk on whether The Internet (pause for silent reverence) is ruining our concentration. I’m willing to see this as a possibility. I know I scan a lot. I glance; I skim. I don’t blame the Internet for it.
Category Archives: Reading
Um, Did You Actually Read the Book?
Fiction readers have better social skills?
Jackie Gingrich Cushman over at Townhall reports on a study from the University of Toronto which concludes that readers of fiction develop betters social skills than readers of nonfiction, because they learn vicariously about the results of various kinds of human interaction.
Funny, it never worked for me. But then my tombstone will say, “Here lies an outlier.” In fact, they’ll probably bury me across the street from the cemetery, so I can outlie some more.
It’s an interesting theory in any case.
Do We Buy Books We Don’t Read?
In England, some authors are asking why people appear to be buying books but not reading them.
More Reading for Guys
Amazon.com has a list of reading material for boys; at least, that’s what my email told me. I see know the list mixes boy and girl interests.
Who’s the greatest Christian fiction writer?
In case you don’t monitor The Thinklings blog, you may want to contribute to Bird’s post asking who is the greatest Christian fiction writer.
Dean Koontz’ full range
Tonight, another episode in my ongoing engagement with the works of Dean Koontz. Not a review, exactly, but an appreciation and evaluation.
I’m going through Koontz alphabetically, picking up his books left to right across the bookstore shelf. This results in some odd juxtapositions, such as when I read Night Chills (published 1976) immediately followed by One Door Away From Heaven (published 2001). Having made it more than half way through the corpus, I think I can say that those two books represent something like the full range of Koontz’ work—from the creppiest early stuff to the most sublime of the recent.
Night Chills is barely recognizable as a Koontz book, in the sense I’ve come to know them. It’s a pretty standard thriller with a cutting-edge (for the time) scientific premise. But the way Koontz handles the material seems to reveal an immature artist, unsure of himself and trying to emulate established writers.
Which is probably why there’s so much sex in the book, and why it’s so (relatively) explicit, and… frankly, creepy. Continue reading Dean Koontz’ full range
Reading for the Fourth
Interesting how the Fourth of July comes around the same time every year.
Veteran newspaper man Frank Wilson talks about saving, if possible, newspapers. He says if newspapers are meant to keep We, the People, informed, then it isn’t terrible for that service to move to another medium.
Still Life
Coffee and Poetry by Marc Iserman of Somerset, England.
Did They Read to Ender When He Was a Child?
Last weekend, I finished listening to a great audio edition of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I wish I could link you to a sample. The voices were great, and in a commentary at the end of the book, Card says he prefers audiobook to other mediums of delivering story, particularly his stories. The listener can’t skip or skim through a story and miss things, diminishing his experience. In another recording I have through Audible.com, Card says he is glad he listened to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, because he believes he would have skipped parts of it near the beginning and not enjoyed it as much as he did at the end. His family still reads books to each other, like people used to do before TV.
Ender’s Game was a great story. Because I loved it and knowing so many others loved it too, I wonder if one of the heartstrings of humanity is dedicated to stories of brilliant children who face great peril–or to put it more broadly, thinking of The Hobbit and LOTR, stories of the humble, the small or weak, facing insurmountable evil or overcoming persecution. Why do we love those stories? It’s David vs. Goliath in as many settings and circumstances as possible.