October 15, 2012
A Pig, a Girl, and a Spider: ‘Charlotte’s Web’ at 60 Some books are so much a part of our childhood experience that when we hear their titles we can almost smell the pages of the book itself, remember where we were when we first opened it, and conjure up entire scenes and memories of reading it for the first or many times thereafter. Charlotte’s Web is one of those books. Today, the most famous book by the masterful E.B. White has turned 60. It is no worse for wear in terms of readability and resonance, even amid a world of Y.A. dystopias, fantasies, and futuristic plots and themes. The simple tale of a pig, a girl, and a spider, beginning with a life saved (Wilbur’s, by the girl, Fern, and later by Charlotte the spider) and ending with a death—but then new life—is threaded through with the personal conflicts, conversations, and camaraderie of the various barnyard creatures involved. It’s one for the ages. Read more. [Image: Paramount]

A Pig, a Girl, and a Spider: ‘Charlotte’s Web’ at 60

Some books are so much a part of our childhood experience that when we hear their titles we can almost smell the pages of the book itself, remember where we were when we first opened it, and conjure up entire scenes and memories of reading it for the first or many times thereafter. Charlotte’s Web is one of those books. Today, the most famous book by the masterful E.B. White has turned 60. It is no worse for wear in terms of readability and resonance, even amid a world of Y.A. dystopias, fantasies, and futuristic plots and themes. The simple tale of a pig, a girl, and a spider, beginning with a life saved (Wilbur’s, by the girl, Fern, and later by Charlotte the spider) and ending with a death—but then new life—is threaded through with the personal conflicts, conversations, and camaraderie of the various barnyard creatures involved. It’s one for the ages.

Read more. [Image: Paramount]

6:14pm
(Notes: 283)
  
Filed under: Lit Books Charlotte's Web Reading E.B. White News 
September 24, 2012
Writers’ Favorite Punctuation Marks R.L. Stine, renowned kid terrifier and author of the upcoming adult horror novel Red Rain: ”When a moment of true horror arises in a novel, there’s no better punctuation than a —.” Deadspin, Gawker, and GQ’s Drew Magary, author of the recent novel The Postmortal: ”I’m a big fan of the period, because it means that I can take a little breather.  Michael Chabon wrote a novel recently that had a 12-page sentence. Why would you do that to a reader? What kind of asshole doesn’t give the reader a break once in a while? Get me to the period so that I can take a moment to digest and go eat a Pop Tart or something. Withholding that period from me is a real dick move. I also like parentheses because I can do whatever the hell I want inside of them. Commas are the worst because eight billion people have eight billion different ideas about where they’re supposed to go.” The Hairpin’s Edith Zimmerman says, ”My favorite is this one:   t(*-*t),” learned from another emoticon-lover, Grantland’s David Cho. “It’s a little dude making two middle fingers,” she explained. Read more. [Image: Flickr/Horia Varlan] Happy National Punctuation Day, everybody. What’s your favorite punctuation mark?

Writers’ Favorite Punctuation Marks

R.L. Stine, renowned kid terrifier and author of the upcoming adult horror novel Red Rain: ”When a moment of true horror arises in a novel, there’s no better punctuation than a —.”

Deadspin, Gawker, and GQ’s Drew Magary, author of the recent novel The Postmortal: ”I’m a big fan of the period, because it means that I can take a little breather.  Michael Chabon wrote a novel recently that had a 12-page sentence. Why would you do that to a reader? What kind of asshole doesn’t give the reader a break once in a while? Get me to the period so that I can take a moment to digest and go eat a Pop Tart or something. Withholding that period from me is a real dick move. I also like parentheses because I can do whatever the hell I want inside of them. Commas are the worst because eight billion people have eight billion different ideas about where they’re supposed to go.”

The Hairpin’s Edith Zimmerman says, ”My favorite is this one:   t(*-*t),” learned from another emoticon-lover, Grantland’s David Cho. “It’s a little dude making two middle fingers,” she explained.

Read more. [Image: Flickr/Horia Varlan]

Happy National Punctuation Day, everybody. What’s your favorite punctuation mark?

1:51pm
(Notes: 419)
  
Filed under: Lit Punctuation Writing Grammar Books Reading 
September 19, 2012
‘Make Sure You Read a Lot of Books’: 10 Writing Rules From Zadie Smith When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page. Read more. [Image: AP] [via Brain Pickings]

‘Make Sure You Read a Lot of Books’: 10 Writing Rules From Zadie Smith

  1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
  2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
  3. Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Read more. [Image: AP] [via Brain Pickings]

1:14pm
(Notes: 634)
  
Filed under: Lit Reading Writing Books Advice Zadie Smith 
September 6, 2012
"I think that David was uncomfortable with happiness. He never entirely felt he deserved happiness."

— Biographer D.T. Max, on David Foster Wallace.

10:14am
(Notes: 106)
  
Filed under: David Foster Wallace D.T. Max Lit Fiction Books Reading Writing Celebs 
August 28, 2012
When Authors Disown Their Work, Should Readers Care? “September 1, 1939” is one of W. H. Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems. Its images of futility and despair in the face of violence, of the inevitable destruction and sacrifice of yet another war have such a universal immediacy that they’ve been revived time and time again, whenever sudden bloodshed rears its head. Perhaps the most quoted line of all is the one that closes the poem’s penultimate stanza: “We must love one another or die.” Only, there’s one minor problem. During his life, Auden rewrote and then renounced the text in question, barring it from future anthologies and publications and distancing himself as much as possible from its creation. As the poet wrote in the 1965 preface to his Collected Poems, “Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.” And what did he mean by that? “A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained,” he explains. “Youth may be forgiven when it is brash and noisy, but this does not mean that brashness and noise are virtues.” And that famous line? The worst offender of the lot. A line, in Auden’s estimation, as false as it is falsely reassuring and self-congratulatory. (Auden first tried to alter it to “We must love one another and die” before altogether giving up on line and poem both.) But are we bound by Auden’s own evaluation of his work, and are we somehow wrong if we seek out—and even dare to enjoy—words that he doesn’t believe in any longer? If he didn’t want to see the poem, should we turn from it as well? The question is an old one, long predating Auden’s famous revisions and recastings: The decision to unwrite, in a manner of speaking, certain moments of past work—and the subsequent split of popular opinion on the justifiability of that choice. When it comes to such arguments, who is right? Who is justified? Why does it matter—and what does it even matter, in the modern age where it’s no longer an easy thing for the past to simply disappear? Read more. [Image: AP]

When Authors Disown Their Work, Should Readers Care?

“September 1, 1939” is one of W. H. Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems. Its images of futility and despair in the face of violence, of the inevitable destruction and sacrifice of yet another war have such a universal immediacy that they’ve been revived time and time again, whenever sudden bloodshed rears its head. Perhaps the most quoted line of all is the one that closes the poem’s penultimate stanza: “We must love one another or die.”

Only, there’s one minor problem. During his life, Auden rewrote and then renounced the text in question, barring it from future anthologies and publications and distancing himself as much as possible from its creation. As the poet wrote in the 1965 preface to his Collected Poems, “Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.” And what did he mean by that? “A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained,” he explains. “Youth may be forgiven when it is brash and noisy, but this does not mean that brashness and noise are virtues.” And that famous line? The worst offender of the lot. A line, in Auden’s estimation, as false as it is falsely reassuring and self-congratulatory. (Auden first tried to alter it to “We must love one another and die” before altogether giving up on line and poem both.)

But are we bound by Auden’s own evaluation of his work, and are we somehow wrong if we seek out—and even dare to enjoy—words that he doesn’t believe in any longer? If he didn’t want to see the poem, should we turn from it as well? The question is an old one, long predating Auden’s famous revisions and recastings: The decision to unwrite, in a manner of speaking, certain moments of past work—and the subsequent split of popular opinion on the justifiability of that choice. When it comes to such arguments, who is right? Who is justified? Why does it matter—and what does it even matter, in the modern age where it’s no longer an easy thing for the past to simply disappear?

Read more. [Image: AP]

10:23am
(Notes: 108)
  
Filed under: Lit Reading Writing 
August 6, 2012
What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids’ Books My copy of Le Petit Prince looks like it has been through a natural disaster. Or two. The dust jacket is torn at every edge. What’s not torn is frayed. A piece of scotch tape holds together the éand r of Exupéry. The white background can’t really be called white anymore. And inside, little pencil markings lurk throughout the text (I would memorize passages when I was young), alongside evidence of attempted erasure—but you know how those old-school Number Two pencils are; all the erasers seem to do is leave things a little grayer than before. The book, in other words, has been well loved. That’s not surprising. Most favorite children’s books are. But there’s one thing about mine that’s different: With the exception of those pesky eraser marks, the damage wasn’t sustained in childhood. Those are adult wounds. The Little Prince is not alone to suffer that horrible fate: the designation of “children’s book” where it’s anything but, where it is actually far more worthy of an adult designation than many a so-called “adult” work. Leaving such books to childhood is a mistake of the worst kind. Fail to re-read them from a more mature standpoint and you’re almost guaranteed to miss what they’re all about. Read more. [Image: Reuters]

What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids’ Books

My copy of Le Petit Prince looks like it has been through a natural disaster. Or two. The dust jacket is torn at every edge. What’s not torn is frayed. A piece of scotch tape holds together the éand r of Exupéry. The white background can’t really be called white anymore. And inside, little pencil markings lurk throughout the text (I would memorize passages when I was young), alongside evidence of attempted erasure—but you know how those old-school Number Two pencils are; all the erasers seem to do is leave things a little grayer than before. The book, in other words, has been well loved.

That’s not surprising. Most favorite children’s books are. But there’s one thing about mine that’s different: With the exception of those pesky eraser marks, the damage wasn’t sustained in childhood. Those are adult wounds.

The Little Prince is not alone to suffer that horrible fate: the designation of “children’s book” where it’s anything but, where it is actually far more worthy of an adult designation than many a so-called “adult” work. Leaving such books to childhood is a mistake of the worst kind. Fail to re-read them from a more mature standpoint and you’re almost guaranteed to miss what they’re all about.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

1:52pm
(Notes: 377)
  
Filed under: Books Lit Children's books Le Petit Prince Reading 
July 17, 2012
How Books Learn Books are very different objects than buildings, because they embody human purposes in very different ways. We see the hand of the architect in a building, and discern her mind, but books seem, to many of us anyway, to have a more intimate relation to human consciousness. We are usually more sensitive to authors’ intentions than to those of architects. (Whether that shouldbe the case is another story.) All that said, books had to learn too and always have. Homer’s epics had to learn Roman ways: Virgil taught them. Sophocles’ Antigone had to realize, during World War II, that it was fundamentally about the French Resistance. The novels of Jane Austen, written as popular entertainment, have been shoehorned into academic contexts, and have been recalcitrant and slow learners, always insisting on being sources of delight. And don’t get me started on the Bible and Shakespeare. Viewed in this context, electronic reading is simply another stage in the education of books, and maybe not one of the more eventful ones. Read more.

How Books Learn

Books are very different objects than buildings, because they embody human purposes in very different ways. We see the hand of the architect in a building, and discern her mind, but books seem, to many of us anyway, to have a more intimate relation to human consciousness. We are usually more sensitive to authors’ intentions than to those of architects. (Whether that shouldbe the case is another story.) All that said, books had to learn too and always have. Homer’s epics had to learn Roman ways: Virgil taught them. Sophocles’ Antigone had to realize, during World War II, that it was fundamentally about the French Resistance. The novels of Jane Austen, written as popular entertainment, have been shoehorned into academic contexts, and have been recalcitrant and slow learners, always insisting on being sources of delight. And don’t get me started on the Bible and Shakespeare.

Viewed in this context, electronic reading is simply another stage in the education of books, and maybe not one of the more eventful ones.

Read more.

12:15pm
(Notes: 162)
  
Filed under: Books Lit Reading Architecture Writing 
July 12, 2012
Carl Sagan’s Reading List Few are the heroes of modern history more successful and inspired than the great Carl Sagan, and his 1954 reading list, part of his papers recently acquired by the Library of Congress, speaks to precisely this blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity and focused, in-field expertise—and is balanced with a healthy approach to reading and “non-reading”, with some books read “in whole” and others “in part.” See what Sagan recommends.

Carl Sagan’s Reading List

Few are the heroes of modern history more successful and inspired than the great Carl Sagan, and his 1954 reading list, part of his papers recently acquired by the Library of Congress, speaks to precisely this blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity and focused, in-field expertise—and is balanced with a healthy approach to reading and “non-reading”, with some books read “in whole” and others “in part.”

See what Sagan recommends.

12:11pm
(Notes: 930)
  
Filed under: Carl Sagan Reading Education Science 
July 2, 2012
How Good Books Can Change You Summer’s here and time for summer reading at the beach, in a hammock or on the porch. Books are great for passing the time on lazy summer afternoons. And according to Ohio State researchers, the books you read from childhood on can also change who you are. They do this by a process the researchers called experience taking. More than just understanding a character, it’s taking a little of them inside of you and changing yourself in the process. It’s not something that you plan on, it happens spontaneously. Good writing helps, but there’s much more involved. Read more. [Image: Alexandre Dulaunoy/Flickr]

How Good Books Can Change You

Summer’s here and time for summer reading at the beach, in a hammock or on the porch. Books are great for passing the time on lazy summer afternoons. And according to Ohio State researchers, the books you read from childhood on can also change who you are.

They do this by a process the researchers called experience taking. More than just understanding a character, it’s taking a little of them inside of you and changing yourself in the process. It’s not something that you plan on, it happens spontaneously. Good writing helps, but there’s much more involved.

Read more. [Image: Alexandre Dulaunoy/Flickr]

2:30pm
(Notes: 625)
  
Filed under: Reading Health Science Lit Books 
June 21, 2012
Why Should Books Still Be Books When They’re on Tablets? For all the disruption in the publishing industry wrought by the Internet, e-readers, and tablets, reading a book still feels like, well, reading a book: tabbing through pages, digesting information linearly. But maybe that will change. The company Semi-Linear is hoping so: Its recently unveiled Citia iPad apps reinvents long-form non-fiction for the tablet, turning books into something that resembles less a sequence of chapters and more a digital spread of sharable, customizable, collectible cards. Read more. [Image: Semi-Linear]

Why Should Books Still Be Books When They’re on Tablets?

For all the disruption in the publishing industry wrought by the Internet, e-readers, and tablets, reading a book still feels like, well, reading a book: tabbing through pages, digesting information linearly. But maybe that will change. The company Semi-Linear is hoping so: Its recently unveiled Citia iPad apps reinvents long-form non-fiction for the tablet, turning books into something that resembles less a sequence of chapters and more a digital spread of sharable, customizable, collectible cards.

Read more. [Image: Semi-Linear]

12:50pm
(Notes: 68)
  
Filed under: Lit Tech Books Reading iPad 
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