“fiction is not only one of the great escapes from the “real world” but also one of the great reflections of it. A good novel can contextualize a moment in history and bring us to understand or accept it with more clarity. Reading can even be a humbling experience, allowing us to discover new perspectives […]
The Power of Fiction Read More »
“Humans love linear time because it’s comforting. But if you push linear time to the side over there (and give it a graham cracker, so it’s okay) then I was fascinated by the idea that epics might be in dialogue with each other rather than that old tired out notion that history is the past
Quotation: Nonlinear Time Read More »
10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) Gizmodo Australia: We asked some of our favourite writers, and they told us the 10 classic books that everyone pretends to have read, and why you should actually read them. From Asimov to Pynchon, science fiction contains some fantastic, ambitious works
Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel,
Quotation: Older Adults in Literature Read More »
“we read because it’s exciting. Metaphorically speaking, books are always taking us to the big city, opening our eyes to the world’s plenitude and diversity. By contrast, those who ban or censor them want to keep us down on the farm, restricting our experience to some safe or approved orthodoxy.” — Michael Dirda
Quotation: Why We Read Read More »
“Choosing to put on a new identity as easily as one might put on a new hat can be a coping mechanism, the start of an elaborate con, the last resort of a victim fleeing an abuser, the refuge of a fantasist who can no longer face reality. Strategy or stratagem, adopting a new name,
“First of all, writing is a way to find community with others, to discover whether you share judgment with them. Secondly, literary-critical debates are efforts to express what someone in a culture sees as urgent and important. Interpretation (or what I understand as simply “reading”) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself. .
Quotation: Writing About Literature Read More »
“When is a book actually read? In the moment you hold it in your hands and scan the words? I don’t really think so: That moment would be more like the moment you ingest an intoxicant, but not the actual ride that it will take you on. The “event” of “Kubla Khan” is not Coleridge
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“INTERVIEWER You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. JOAN DIDION It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way.
Joan Didion on Writing Read More »
