Category Archives: reading

Magic Portals

books, reading,

The first Harry Potter movie is playing on television this evening, and Harry has just walked through the portal into Diagon Alley for the first time. I can remember where I was when I read the book, a recommendation from my nephew. It was a thick book, but after a few pages of reading, the thickness was comforting, assuring me that I was in for a good read. We were on vacation, and I stole moments when I could, laying across the bed, sprawled in a lounge chair, riding in the back seat of the car, savoring the story of the boy who lived.

I didn’t have to worry about taking a test, or writing in my journal, or participating in book club. I knew I was have a wonderful conversation with my nephew when I saw him next but for now, it was the reading that took center stage. I stepped through the magic portal into Diagon Alley with Harry and never looked back.

As a younger girl, I loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, another book with a magic portal. My bedroom in our house had a closet that reached far into the eaves. I was sure if I just crawled a little further, I would find myself in a new world that lay beyond the back of the closet. It was not to be, of course, but perhaps books were my magic portals.

I’m surrounded by books in my farmhouse library, some that have been with me for a lifetime. I can trace the timeline of my life, the arc of my education, as I browse the shelves. Like Harry Potter, I can remember where I was when I read many of them, which class I was taking or where I was living. There’s a trip across the state with The Da Vinci Code, its short choppy chapters marking the miles. It took Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings to get me across the United States.

The former owner of the house was also a book person. He owned a great collection of what I think of as dime novels, the small format paperbacks that were popular when I was young. They line a top shelf and I’m determined to read through some of them. He was evidently fascinated by contemporary science, and there are books that live just on the edge of my memories, books about genetics and computers at a time when they still seemed like magic portals.

I’ve got a running list of books to read for now, but I’m exploring the challenges at LibraryThing. I’ve done two of them already in 2015–books by British and Australian writers–and had enjoyable reads of The Remains of the Day and Gould’s Book of Fish, both of which have been lurking for some time.  I finished some great books the last time I dove into reading gamification.

 

A Meditation on Reading

books, reading

I am a book reader. No matter what is happening in my life, I have a book in the works. Even if it’s just five minutes before I fall asleep at night, I read.  If you ask me, “what are you reading?” I have an answer. At some point, every day, I escape from the “real” world into the world created by a writer.

This morning, I woke up in Montana in the late 1800s. Ivan Doig’s Dancing At the Rascal Fair describes the experience of two young Scottish men who emigrate to Montana and end up outside Gros Ventre, Montana, starting a sheep farm. Doig’s prose evokes a landscape of beauty and isolation as men leave behind the known world to establish themselves in this new wilderness.

Tonight, before I turn out the light, I’ll take a turn in old New Orleans with Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character in A Confederacy of Dunces. It is a book on the edge: the characters threaten to move into craziness at any given moment, trapped in a world of their own imaginations. According to Wikipedia, this book, published many years after Toole’s suicide, is now considered “a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.”

For me, reading is an escape, a chance to connect to worlds beyond my own. I look forward to those moments beyond the day, when an author’s story connects me to a different world. There is no writer, no reader, just the shared language that creates a new place and time where I can be for awhile.

When I taught reading, I wanted to create this kind of world for my students, giving them a chance to move beyond the school day into a world of imagination. We read for 20 to 30 minutes at least three days a week, books they chose, and then we talked and wrote about them. I know that some of them learned to love reading in a way that had not before. I know others couldn’t wait until reading time was over. And that’s OK…reading isn’t something everyone loves. But I gave them a chance to at least decide for themselves and that’s really what matters to me.

The Ultimate Gamification of Reading

books, reading

Last year, I wrote about using LibraryThing challenges to gamify my own reading practice.

But James Patterson trumps it all with his self-destructing book. In order to draw attention to his new thriller, Patterson and has publishing company have  created a digital book that disappears after 24 hours. Complete with a count down timer in the upper right hand corner, the digital product seems to straddle the line between book and game. According to the article, readers an steal time from other people.

Really? Has it come to this? I understand that it is a marketing ploy but it is sending some other kinds of messages that Patterson may not appreciate not the least of which is that this is not any kind of demanding read since it will take less than 24 hours* and doesn’t require a whole lot of attention. I read my own share of “guilty pleasures,” but once we start suggesting that books must be games, then we really do spell the death knoll of the book and, even more importantly, attentive, critical, serious reading.

*And probably a lot less since I suspect most people won’t take the day off to read.

Predicting the End of Things

books, Kindle, reading,
A recent article in the The Telegraph hailed the end of the Kindle and the return to paper books. This wasn’t about reading: this was about the actual technology of reading and it was based on sales numbers for the two technologies. Kindle sales are down. Paper book sales are up. For those of us who haven’t abandoned paper books, it wasn’t as much of a surprise. We like books. I read both analog and digital books but I think, in the long run, I prefer analog. It’s just a technology that works. Easier to cuddle up with at night and, evidently, not as much of an interference with my sleep according to recent reports. No batteries to die just as I am learning that the butler did indeed do it. And no distractions in the form of notifications about new moves in Words with Friends.
I wonder about the Kindle sales, though. They could be more about all the variety of ways you can read a Kindle book from the web browser to the iPad to your phone. I have Kindle apps on all my devices and I do like to be able to pop in when I’m standing in line to catch up on a few pages or sneak in a bit of reading during a long webinar.
What I would really like to see are statistics about the practice rather than the technology. Are people READING more with all those new book sales or do they just want to put them on the coffee table? In a recent episode of The Newsroom, the Silicon valley billionaire runs his fingers along the books in a library and comments that they make good decorations even though the book itself is dead. Evidently, he hadn’t read this article.
My suggestion to prognosticators is to stop prognosticating. Maybe, indeed, a particular piece of hardware is dead, but the practice of digital reading is not going to go away and, it seems, neither is the old fashioned analog version either. People are people, with lots of preferences, and as long as there is demand, supply will follow right along.

GREAT Writing Ideas…But A Little Sad

reading, writing

My reading this morning has been all about writing: from the rules from writers at Brain Pickings to Pernille Ripp’s ideas for making writing fun again.

I was a little saddened, though, when Pernille mentioned that she could only afford 5 minutes of free writing and 10 minutes of free reading in her tight 45-minute class. I am grateful that I taught in the heady days before standardized testing when I could afford to have 30 minutes of free reading 3 days a week in my language arts class. Plus, doing all that reading meant that everyone had something they could write about, too.