This worries me a little (by Toby Litt in Granta): A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in …
Tag Archive: reading
Feb 07 2012
Reading is Self-Mastery
D.G. Myers positions reading not as an escape but as a challenge to ourselves: To read an author is to read someone different from ourselves. Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial. Any book that is any good challenges its readers: This is so, isn’t it? Did you know this? Have you considered that? [ … …
Sep 21 2011
“If They Like Printed Books, They Should Be Buying the Damn Things”
Richard Nash validates my take on what I call the “But I Love the Smell of Books” argument against the digitization of the traditional codex, focusing on the fact that if books are so important as physical artifacts, they are not being treated as such by the industry or even consumers: If they like printed …
Jun 25 2011
A Natural Worshiper of Serendipity and Whim: Alan Jacobs’ “Pleasures of Reading”
Alan Jacobs, who readers of this blog (all ten of you) may know from previous references to his excellent blog TextPatterns, has recently released a wonderful book about reading that I simply can’t recommend highly enough. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction is just the sort of pithy, sympathetic tract that our times demand — …
Feb 08 2010
Hypoliteracy
I am not reading a book. Washington, DC is shut down today, and besides doing some catch-up work here and there, I essentially have a bonus day off. Hooray! What a rare and often-wished-for opportunity to do some quiet, relaxed book reading! Visit my Goodreads page and you can see that I am juggling several books that I …
Jan 29 2010
Bryson’s “At Home”: A Delightful Slog through Human Misery
About halfway through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, one can’t help but come to a couple of stark conclusions. One, that most of humanity’s domestic life, for the vast majority of time time we had domestic lives, was full of suffering and misery the likes of which we moderns can barely imagine. Two, …
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