Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.
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Entries Tagged as 'reading'
“The White Tiger: A Novel” – Aravind Adiga
January 29th, 2012 · No Comments · Reading Related, Uncategorized
Tags:reading
My Year in Reading – Part 2
December 23rd, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related, Uncategorized
Following on from Monday’s post, here’s the second half of my reading for 2011: “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa”, Jason Stearns – A history of the Congo Wars; a twenty year conflict that involved a dozen countries and cost six million lives that [...]
Tags:reading·Year in Reading
My Year in Reading 2011 – Part 2
December 23rd, 2011 · No Comments · Admin, Campaigning, Politics, Reading Related, UK Labour, United Kingdom
Following on from Monday’s post, here’s the second half of my reading for 2011: “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa”, Jason Stearns – A history of the Congo Wars; a twenty year conflict that involved a dozen countries and cost six million lives that [...]
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Tags:reading
My Year in Reading 2011 – Part 1
December 19th, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related, Uncategorized
About three years ago I resolved to make enough time in my life to read one book a week. I’ve always read quite a bit, but reading being a domestic activity, it had always been the subject of the vicissitudes of domestic life. Busy periods at work, social commitments or just lack of overall motivation [...]
Tags:End of Year Reading List·reading
The Problem of Book Reviewing – “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” from “Fifty Orwell Essays” – George Orwell
Well it might have been difficult to organise 50 years ago, but this sounds to me a lot like social media enabled book reviewing today…
November 11th, 2011 · No Comments · Criticism, Culture, ICT, Reading Related
people sometimes suggest that the solution lies in getting book reviewing out of the hands of hacks. Books on specialised subjects ought to be dealt with by experts, and on the other hand a good deal of reviewing, especially of novels, might well be done by amateurs. Nearly every book is capable of arousing passionate [...]
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Tags:blogosphere·reading·social media
The Value of Books – “Books v Cigarettes” from “Fifty Orwell Essays” – George Orwell
November 11th, 2011 · No Comments · Culture, Reading Related
Adding the other batch of books that I have elsewhere, it seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of 165 15s. This is the accumulation of about fifteen years—actually more, since some of these books date from my childhood: but call it fifteen years. …. It is difficult to establish any relationship [...]
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Well Read – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 6th, 2011 · No Comments · Culture, Reading Related
Eckstein was enormously well read. He just couldn’t bear to admit that there was something he had missed. It is very easy to get that reputation. When strangers know that your speciality is books, their usual way of breaking the ice is to ask you if you have read such-and-such a book. The penalty for [...]
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Tags:reading
Beatrix Potter – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 4th, 2011 · No Comments · Parenting, Reading Related
Beatrix Potter got her poetry from prose: which is to say, from speech, concentrated. Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by [...]
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Grammar and Reading – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 2nd, 2011 · No Comments · Elitism, Reading Related
As Kingsley Amis acutely noted, the person who uses “disinterested” for “uninterested” is unlikely to see your article complaining about the point, because the person has never been much of a reader anyway.
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Tags:Literacy·reading
The Challenges of Reading Gibbon – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 1st, 2011 · No Comments · Civilisation, Culture, History, Reading Related, Writing
There was never much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn’t work like that and neither does prose. But there is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should [...]
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Tags:Grammar·Plain English·reading·Sentence Structure·writing
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