THOMAS JEFFERSON ON NEWSPAPERS July 4, 2010
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting, Reading.add a comment
Thomas Jefferson said — or maybe wrote? — “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” I’m beginning to think maybe I should do the same….
HOWARD ENGEL ON ALEXIA June 28, 2010
Posted by thenaturalist in Journals, Memory Books, Reading, Writing.add a comment
In July 2001, Canadian writer Howard Engel suffered a stroke that resulted in alexia — an inability to recognize written language — but he could still write. While he was in the rehab hospital, one of the therapists suggested that he keep a “memory book.” As a lifelong keeper of journals, Howard was delighted by this idea. He says, “I learned to write things down in the ‘memory book’ the moment I thought of them…. The memory book gave a lift to my sense of being in the driver’s seat of my life. It became my constant companion: part diary, part appointment book, part commonplace book. Hospitals, to a degree breed a passive spirit; the memory book returned a piece of myself to me.” In 2005, Howard published a new novel called Memory Book, and in 2007 he published a memoir, which he called The Man Who Forgot How to Read. (Background information from Oliver Sacks’ “A Neurologist’s Notebook: A Man of Letters,” The New Yorker, June 28, 2010)
EZRA POUND ON READING November 3, 2008
Posted by thenaturalist in Ezra Pound, Reading.add a comment
Ezra Pound said of reading, “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.” I wonder whether a woman should feel the same way?
READING: WILDER’S RULE November 20, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Reading.add a comment
When asked whether it was fair to read for pleasure, Thornton Wilder said to give a book eight pages, read eight pages and if the book itself has not captured your imagination and impelled you to go on, throw it across the room. I agree, although I’m a tad more tolerant. I give books ten pages. I have also come to believe that forcing yourself to read words that do not inform you or give you pleasure kills brain cells.
