Jellyby closets
Passage from Charles Dickens' Bleak House
Dickens on the Kindle
"Distractions abounded."
Good news, bad news about reading
From the National Endowment for the Humanities: fiction up, overall reading down
Reading don't pay
From Dickens' Bleak House
JANUARY (WPA Art Project)
A Year of Good . . . . Reading Ahead
Jack Cella on decent bookstores
The general manager of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores: "If you're in a decent bookstore, you can look at any shelf and realize how little you know."
Books as calendars (Proust)
On reading in childhood
Scholastic madeleines
Scans of Scholastic Book Club covers
Sem Co-op snags Penguins
Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore succeeds in obtaining Penguin's Great Ideas paperbacks, third series, not published in the U.S.
Penguin's not so great idea
Penguin's Great Books, third series, won't be published in the U.S. But there may still be a not too expensive way to get the books.
Penguin's Great Ideas
Excerpt from review of Peguin's Great Ideas paperbacks, third series, with links to photos of the covers
Note to self re: bookbuying
Many times in the past two years, I've bought just-out hardcover non-fiction and been hugely disappointed, sometimes by the ideas, sometimes...
"Books v. Cigarettes"
Orwell on the cost of reading
The Vacation Reading Club
1939 WPA poster
Psychedelic textbook
Textbook cover, from 1968!
Borders Books and Music in trouble
From an article in tomorrow's New York Times : Struggling against both online and big-box retailers, the Borders Group, the bookseller, sai...
"A lot out there is conspiring to distract you"
More on continuous partial attention and reading habits : I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to f...
Richard Rorty on the value of literature
The inspirational value Rorty claims for literature lies in its capacity to "make people think there is more to this life than they ever ima...
Zadie Smith on reading
Great observation on what it means to really be a reader
George Steiner on reading
In his essay "The end of bookishness?" George Steiner anticipates the near-disappearance of what he calls "classical reading," reading that ...
American reading habits
Depressing statistics on reading
Words, mere words
On the value of language
Homer rules
Homer in top 10 library books
N'allez pas trop vite
On the value of reading Proust
Graphic novels in Booth
Booth Library recently purchased a great many graphic novels and comics-related books. “Graphic novel” is a strange term, as graphic novels ...
Not dead yet
[Last words for English 2601, Backgrounds of Western Literature] When an interviewer asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite liv...
Words for those on the road
[Last words for English 3009, Myth and Culture] The ancient Greek word for “truth,” alēthia , literally means “that which is not forgotten.”...
On the relevance of the classics
At Chicago's Wilbur Wright College, where the majority of students are immigrants, nonwhite, or both, Professor Bruce Gans runs a successful...
Problems
From "Reflections on the "Problem Novel," by Barbara Feinberg: It is easy to spot Alex’s assigned reading books among his real books. His re...
Jim Jarmusch: favorite books
From an audio clip included with the Criterion Collection dvd of Down by Law : I love the book Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I like F...