Category: reading
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Emotionally Intelligent Readers
We learn from reading. We develop skills to process the world around us, and our interactions with it. We can see models of human interconnection and decide what we should do, in similar settings. “we turn to stories. Stories provide us with a broad template. They outline a pattern specific enough to be of tremendous…
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So Many Books
I was listening to a podcast at work, as I often do to occupy my mind while my fingers are busy with mindless tasks, and a line caught me ‘you can only read so many books in your life.’ The speaker then went on to recommend a documentary on Netflix. So instead of reading, you…
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Read More, Live More
My mother used to scold me about reading too much. ‘Go outside!’ she’d say. ‘Enjoy the sunshine!’ when she’d find me curled up with my nose in a book. Later, she’d tell me I was reading too many books. She was worried I was neglecting my schoolwork, but I could point out that my grades…
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Book Review: Honor of the Legion
Good morning, gentle readers. Today I am guesting over at Sarah Hoyt’s blog, talking about the meanings of words and one in particular. While I am there, one of my fans and friends, Doug Irvin, is here. He agreed to read and review a couple of books for me and this is the first of…
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Quitting Time
This is a follow-up to a post I wrote last week, at the Mad Genius Club. In it, I talked about how I’d learned to quit books. It’s not that I’m quitting reading, oh, no. What I did was learn how to put a bad book down instead of letting it suck part of my…
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The Reader Makes the Book
I’ve known for a long time that every reader sees a book differently. I may really enjoy a book that makes you want to hold your nose with one hand and gingerly pick it up with thumb and forefinger of the other hand to transport rapidly to the trash. It’s part of the reason I…
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Reading in Print or on a Screen
A friend was good enough to send me a link to a lengthy paper on literary reading on paper versus on a screen. The Digitization of Literary Reading, by A Mangen, points out quite correctly that the transition between paper books as we know them and digital reading methods is no different than the changes…
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Broad Reading
I’ve talked on the blog and elsewhere many times about the importance of reading if you plan to become a good writer. I’m sure you can write without reading – well, knowing how to read seems to be a requirement, but reading other works is technically optional. Stephanie Souders wrote a wonderful essay about this…
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It’s all Literature
From the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “Deriving from the Latin littera, “a letter of the alphabet,” literature is first and foremost humankind’s entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given language or people; then it is individual pieces of writing.” It is only within that broad generalization that we see…
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Defending fiction
Over at the Mad Genius Club I have a guest post from Amie Gibbons up, and I think if you enjoy reading, this is a good post for you. I asked Amie Gibbons for a guest post after I saw a short thing she’d written indignantly defending fiction: “Don’t tell me fiction is a waste…
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Review: Chicken Feet and Comfort Reading
No, no, I haven’t been cooking with chicken feet. Yes, I know it’s a thing. No, I really don’t plan to try it, although at least I know to take the chicken toenails off before serving. I’m talking about When Chicken Feet Cross the Highway by Alma Boykin. I’m always a sucker for Baba Yaga,…
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Book Hoarding and Other Delights
There has never been a better time to be a reader. I’ve been reading since I was four, myself, which is a very small slice of the past when viewed in relative terms. But I am also a student of history. it wasn’t that long ago that books were individually precious, treasured and cared for…