Category: reading
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why we want mirrors
I’ve written several times about Fran Liebowitz’s discussion of books from the Netflix series, Pretend It’s a City. The most striking of her comments, being of course, the moment when she says, “a book isn’t supposed to be a mirror, it’s supposed to be a door!” Jennifer Egan expands upon…
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portals to other places
For some reason, the concept of the portal has been on my mind lately. It could be the hypotrochoid set I bought at a thrift store recently, but it was also likely brought on by this interview with Jennifer Egan, in which she says, “reading is always about finding a…
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diving deep
Normally as I read a book, I’m thinking about how it works. I ask myself what the sentences are doing, what’s happening with the characters, how is the storyteller drawing me into the story and what are they trying to convey. I think it’s asking these questions that prevents me…
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nothing to say
In her book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell cites Gilles Deleuze’s Negotiations: We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of…
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a nocturnal generation
In my early twenties, I took Kerouac a little too seriously. The case could be made I read On The Road at exactly the right moment, during the worst summer of my life, a time that would shape and change me in so many ways. As school resumed, I found…
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a call to action
I read an article on LinkedIn yesterday about throwing the world’s biggest party when we come out on the other side of the pandemic. “It will be a party for hugging our family and friends,” says writer Dennis K. Berman, “but also for acknowledging that the virus, in its twisted…
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letting go
I’ve never been great at letting go of things. But I’ve come to realize letting go might be the single most important lesson to be learned. The one constant in life is that everything changes. If we aren’t able to adapt to that change–to let go of the way things…
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confessions
In How Fiction Works, James Wood explores Dostoyevsky’s use of layered character: Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love…
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the things that last forever
The storm of life is raging for me at the moment, but maybe not in the way you’d expect. Let’s just say I’ve been thinking differently about what I want. Doing so has made me contemplate the temporality of things and shift my focus regarding what’s important. I finished Alan…
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learning my lesson
In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho uses the titular character to give voice to confronting the lessons we’ve learned: “…before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in…
joshua chamberlain 