reading habits
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Book Etiquette
At the New York Times Sunday Book Review, humorist and journalist Henry Alford gives advice for borrowing books, giving books as gifts, and commenting on books when you recognize the one the stranger across from you on the train is…
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Attention Spans Fall, Short Fiction Rises
That is not to say that normal books will decline. Of course they won’t. There will always be a place for big, satisfying stories to burrow through. But it seems that the rise of short stories are partly caused by…
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Young Adults Still Go to the Library
The Pew Research Center recently released a report about younger Americans’s (ages 16-29) attitudes toward libraries. As it turns out, young adults still read books, they still visit libraries—at least as much as older Americans—and many use library services. There…
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Read Slowly, Read Better
Reading is healthy, but not all reading is created equally. Advocates of slow reading suggest that dedicated periods of thirty to forty-five minutes away from other distractions can lower stress and maximize reading benefits. And reading online content just isn’t…
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The Theory of Trickle-Up Literacy
One does not pass from lower to higher. On the contrary one might perfectly well fall from the higher to the lower, or simply read both, as many people eat both good food and junk food, the only problem being…
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Zadie Smith: Pathological Reader
In Oprah, the author writes that her consumption of books may be absurd, but that, at least, summer is a good time to have pathological reading habits. I would like to say in my defense that I don’t really get the appeal…
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How to Read Online and Still Understand Things
This New Yorker article sums up some recent thinking on the psychological effects of online reading. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address…
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The Hawking Index
The Hawking Index was created by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg to measure how much of a book readers were actually reading, by analyzing Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature on Kindle devices. Over at the Guardian, writer and literary critic Alex Clark and…
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On Changing Things
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks gives us a short, historical narrative concerned with the ways in which our changing attention spans have altered our reading experiences, as well what forms of literature we are…
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Reading Where You Do Not Belong
Somehow I’d never heard of Sylvia Townsend Warner until the New Yorker posted its fiction podcast this week, which is Colm Toìbìn reading one of Warner’s stories. In my life, the consequence of discovering a forgotten writer like Warner is…
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Reluctant Readers Gender Breakdown
A recent article in Sunday’s NY Times Book Review breaks down reading habits by gender, reporting that boys read less than girls. This revelation may be surprising given the plethora of YA fiction out there—one of the only booming genre…
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Good News About Kids and the Future
There’s a series of articles published by McSweeney’s that is re-contextualizing the state of the publishing industry. These essays are set out to address the facts which are often obscured by the fraught and perilous language abundant in the publishing…