The top 10 books about reading A list by Rebecca Mead, author of The Road to Middlemarch: I wasn’t aware of the term “bibliomemoir” until the novelist Joyce Carol Oates used it – or perhaps coined it? – in reviewing my book, The Road to Middlemarch, earlier this year. But it’s a fitting enough label […]
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience HarperCollins, 1990 ISBN 0–06–092043–2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life Basic Books, 1997 ISBN 0–465–02411–4 Athletes talk about being “in the zone.” For musicians, it’s being “in the groove.” Even if you’re not an athlete or a musician, you’ve probably shared the
Getting Lost in a Good Book: Scientific Research on Reading Have you ever gotten so absorbed in reading a novel that you lost track of time and of what was happening around you—-even, in fact, that there was a world around you outside of the one you were reading about? Most serious readers have had
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Annie Proulx regrets writing Brokeback Mountain? She needs to let it go “I wish I’d never written the story,” Proulx told the Paris Review. “It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out … So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave
Related Post: CLASSICS CLUB SPIN #8 Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road Original publication date: 1961 Rpt. Random House, 2008 eISBN 978–0–307–45627–4 This novel is most often described as an anti-suburban tract, a condemnation of the life of conformity and veiled unhappiness that flourished in the U.S. after World War II. And it is that. But it’s
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Goodreads has just asked me to declare my personal reading challenge for 2015. Last year I chose 40 books as my goal and managed to read 43. Yet I see other people who plan—and in past years have managed—to read 100 books or more in a year. What’s wrong with me? I could give up
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I read 43 books this year, for a grand total of 12,695 pages. The longest was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weighs in at 771 pages. Here, listed alphabetically by author, are the 10 best: Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life Fergus, Jim. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd French, Tana. Faithful Place
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Preparing this list is my least favorite task of the year. Here are the people from the writing and publishing worlds whom we lost during 2014, including, where available, a link to an obituary and date of death. Elizabeth Jane Howard 1/2 Tom Rosenthal Amiri Baraka 1/9 Juan Gelman 1/14 Leslie Lee 1/20 Jose Emilio
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There Are Way Too Many ‘Best Of 2014′ Lists If you despair over working your way through all these lists, just take a look at Hayley Munguia’s distillation: I set about compiling lists of the best books, movies and TV shows of 2014 in prominent national publications.1 My colleague Andrew Flowers helped me run the
In books by soldiers and reporters about Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s the details that slam home a sense of what the wars were like on the front lines: a suicide bomber’s head pulled from the rubble of the mosque he’d bombed; the sonogram of an unborn child found among a soldier’s remains; a bomb technician
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