Edgar who?
Patrick Leigh Fermor: “Except for his long Edgar Wallace cigarette holder, our host could have sat for a picture of St. Jerome.”
Flannery O’Connor on interpretation
“If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction.”
Seventeen ideas about interpretation
No. 2: “Criticism is not a negation of pleasure. Knowing more about what it is you’re reading can only inform and deepen pleasure, if there’s genuine pleasure to be had. Knowledge (not ignorance) is bliss.”
Against “deep reading”
“‘Deep reading’ meant that nothing could be what it appeared to be: every element of a story had to stand for something else, quotidian details coming together to form something like an allegorical pageant. . . . In truth, there’s nothing deep about “deep reading” (thus my continuing use of quotation marks): it’s a reductive way of engaging works of the imagination, operating on every one of them in the same damn way.”
The page-ninety-nine test
Should really be the page-ninety test.
Tim Parks on “reading upward”
“In the teaching world, the idea of reading upward often leads to a preoccupation with gateway books. The way to get ‘them’ interested in, say, Charles Dickens, is to start with, say, J. K. Rowling. Uh, no.”
Orange bookmark art
“I don’t think the paint manufacturers of our nation will mind that much if a dedicated reader here and there decides to use a paint sample as a bookmark.”
Also from Robert Walser
“When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don’t do anything stupid.”
On “trigger warnings”
I wonder: what do students who favor trigger warnings expect to find in literature?
“Something is missing”
A passage from Absalom, Absalom! that works as a compact reader’s guide.
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the English major
“Ventriloquistic syntax.”
Reading, before and after
An excerpt from Andrew Piper’s Book Was There.
Reading surveilled
The act of reading itself is becoming data.
A Phi Beta Kappa infographic
“What those of us in higher education can do to make this infographic’s assertions credible: drop the PowerPoints and (so-called) study guides and perfunctory course requirements and ask students to engage in significant reading and writing and discussion. The stuff college is made of, or should be.”
Borges on reading
“Reading should be a form of happiness.”
Ernest Borgnine reads
Ernest Borgnine reads Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish. Just lovely.
William Zinsser, listening
“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.”
The bookish expelled
“They dwell on passages. They ask difficult questions. They might even stare out a window for a while and think about what they have read.”
Bobbing for apples
“to read, really read, one must do much more than bob. Repeated immersions, to the limit of one’s ability to remain underwater: that’s what will let you come up with something worthwhile.”
Overheard
“I never read!”
Close reading and the brain
Stanford researchers are looking at the effect of close reading on the brain.
Donald J. Sobol (1924–2012)
Donald J. Sobol, the creator of Encyclopedia Brown, has died at the age of eighty-seven.
Rooms, radios, hurdles
Jacques Barzun: “Jane Austen could write novels in the family parlor and some people can think in a boiler factory, but it is foolish to take the hardest hurdles first when the power of attention is so rare.”
Literary reading, standardized tests
“We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts.”
“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”
A passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
“In March read”
“In March read the books you’ve always meant to read”: a WPA poster.
Recreational and recreative reading
I remember some years ago hearing of a college administrator who characterized English studies as “recreative reading.” It seems appropriate that he chose the needless variant.
Awesome People Reading
Awesome People Reading collects photographs of just that.
Marshall McLuhan’s reading strategy
Begin on page 69.
Proust in Miami
Old folks reading Proust.