"I asked a room full of M.A. English students about the reading they were doing outside the curriculum. At least a third did not do any, which makes them functional aliterates. Aliterates are people that can read but do not. They read just enough to get by. If a language and literature department can have so many of them, then what about students in other disciplines?
What do you lose by becoming an aliterate? Quite a lot, actually. According to Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the United States, while reading “we are forced to construct, to produce narrative, to imagine. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language — when you watch a film or listen to a tape — you don't press pause.” Hence, the mind receives a far more vigorous workout whilst reading than consuming any other form of media. It is not surprising that avid readers tend to possess better memories and minds more equipped to resist the exigencies of ageing than those who do not read. Their capacity for learning also tends to be far more advanced. In addition, since reading requires more concentration than other media, an avid reader's mind tends to be more focused which allows him or her to make good decisions."
More: http://www.thehindu.com/education/issues/article3232453.ece
30/03/2012
28/03/2012
Why reading matters
"By challenging — through reading — our imagination to engage and embrace ever changing, often alien, characters, circumstances, and dilemmas, we expand our ability to empathize and understand; to be human, that is.
Does it matter? What use is the imagination — as opposed to, say, the kind of mental agility, the quick-reflex thinking, that video games encourage? What is the argument we make for reading and daydreaming and cultivating inner resonances? I would say, to put it in the simplest terms, that imagination nourishes the primary self. As much as our skills and practical accomplishments bolster a sense of independent identity, imagination fills out the inner counterpart. It consolidates the "I" by making plausible the other. Imagination enables empathy, and imagination exercised through reading, through the work of inhabiting the language and sensibility of created characters… pushes continually against the solipsism fed to us by a marketing industry selling consumption as the index of our worth."
More: http://m.voiceofsandiego.org/mobile/cafe-san-diego/poe/article_5ca0cd90-779a-11e1-9a3f-001871e3ce6c.html
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Does it matter? What use is the imagination — as opposed to, say, the kind of mental agility, the quick-reflex thinking, that video games encourage? What is the argument we make for reading and daydreaming and cultivating inner resonances? I would say, to put it in the simplest terms, that imagination nourishes the primary self. As much as our skills and practical accomplishments bolster a sense of independent identity, imagination fills out the inner counterpart. It consolidates the "I" by making plausible the other. Imagination enables empathy, and imagination exercised through reading, through the work of inhabiting the language and sensibility of created characters… pushes continually against the solipsism fed to us by a marketing industry selling consumption as the index of our worth."
More: http://m.voiceofsandiego.org/mobile/cafe-san-diego/poe/article_5ca0cd90-779a-11e1-9a3f-001871e3ce6c.html
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www.SPYWRITER.com
21/03/2012
Reading fiction no different from real-life encounters
"Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters."
Fiction, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1
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The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters."
Fiction, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1
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www.SPYWRITER.com
16/03/2012
A world in a book
"Ever since I was a small child, I never felt anything but pure love for reading books of all shapes and sizes. It was not until later that I realized that reading books was not just a form of entertainment but also a powerful tool that humans have used to communicate and gain knowledge as early as people could write.
A good book can open up minds to new ideas that seemed impossible before. Doctors, teachers, psychologists, mothers, cooks, students and every occupation imaginable requires proficient reading skills to succeed at what they do not only in their jobs but in their lives as well
This is because reading is the basis for all the other communication skills, such as writing, speaking, and even listening. Books are the key to the hearts of thousands of people. They record who we essentially are as humans. Books have the power to create riots, to calm stressful days, or to inspire new movements in the world. A world can be contained within a book’s pages."
More: http://my.hsj.org/DesktopModules/ASNE/ASNE.Newspapers/Mobile.aspx?newspaperid=48&editionid=0&categoryid=0&articleid=508090&userid=0
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A good book can open up minds to new ideas that seemed impossible before. Doctors, teachers, psychologists, mothers, cooks, students and every occupation imaginable requires proficient reading skills to succeed at what they do not only in their jobs but in their lives as well
This is because reading is the basis for all the other communication skills, such as writing, speaking, and even listening. Books are the key to the hearts of thousands of people. They record who we essentially are as humans. Books have the power to create riots, to calm stressful days, or to inspire new movements in the world. A world can be contained within a book’s pages."
More: http://my.hsj.org/DesktopModules/ASNE/ASNE.Newspapers/Mobile.aspx?newspaperid=48&editionid=0&categoryid=0&articleid=508090&userid=0
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Authors responsible for high cost of books
"In his forthcoming book [...] the American author Robert Levine has an excellent chapter on publishing in which he interrogates the forces driving the pricing of books, in both their paper and digital forms. And some of the explanations he gives are (to me at least) surprising. For example, it turns out that "publishers only spend $3.50 to print and distribute a hardback". (Let's say it's £3 in Britain.) So when, this autumn, you go into your local bookshop and spend £30 [...] you really are just putting a large amount of profit into the hands of [...] publisher, with some knocked off for the retailer. Right?
Well, yes and no. If you think of books primarily as physical objects, then off course they'll seem a rip-off, because printing and distributing them is cheap. But as Levine points out, what you're really paying for when you buy a book is something different. You are buying the "text itself". And why is that so expensive? Because the publisher will, in many cases, have paid the author a considerable sum for the right to sell it.".
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/aug/04/price-publishing-ebooks
Ha.
Ha.
That "considerable sum", dear reader, amounts to somewhere between 4-8%.
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Well, yes and no. If you think of books primarily as physical objects, then off course they'll seem a rip-off, because printing and distributing them is cheap. But as Levine points out, what you're really paying for when you buy a book is something different. You are buying the "text itself". And why is that so expensive? Because the publisher will, in many cases, have paid the author a considerable sum for the right to sell it.".
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/aug/04/price-publishing-ebooks
Ha.
Ha.
That "considerable sum", dear reader, amounts to somewhere between 4-8%.
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www.SPYWRITER.com
When does a novelist retire?
"The fact is that authors seldom retire. Many don’t want to; others couldn’t afford to. So they keep going till death drags them from their desk or they lose their marbles, whichever fate strikes earlier. Unfortunately they may find that while they still have their marbles, they no longer have a public, those who used to buy their books having already suffered one of these fates, or having simply stopped reading new books – even new books from old authors. Losing their public, they are likely, quite understandably, to lose their publisher too. This may grieve, but not entirely surprise, them; it began to seem likely when they discovered a couple of books back that their new editor was a decade or two younger than their own middle-aged children.
“We used to live on royalties,” Anthony Burgess once said to me, “but now we live on advances.” This was true in his time, but now the advances are shrinking, and the royalties disappearing. So they go on working, but do so, if they are honest, in the knowledge that what they are writing in their old age is not near as good as the best of the books they wrote thirty or forty years ago. This is sad but not surprising. They no longer have either the physical or mental energy that used to drive them on. Moreover they have probably exhausted their material, and any new material they happen on may be thinner than the old stuff.
Occasionally they pick up a novel they wrote long ago, and read it with surprise, admiration, and then pain. And then they think: “Fielding and Jane Austen and all the Brontës were already dead at the age I was when I wrote that – and so they didn’t have to find matter for a new novel in their sixties, seventies, eighties…”
More: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/allanmassie/100061155/novelists-used-to-die-young-now-they-must-confront-and-write-throughout-their-old-age/
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“We used to live on royalties,” Anthony Burgess once said to me, “but now we live on advances.” This was true in his time, but now the advances are shrinking, and the royalties disappearing. So they go on working, but do so, if they are honest, in the knowledge that what they are writing in their old age is not near as good as the best of the books they wrote thirty or forty years ago. This is sad but not surprising. They no longer have either the physical or mental energy that used to drive them on. Moreover they have probably exhausted their material, and any new material they happen on may be thinner than the old stuff.
Occasionally they pick up a novel they wrote long ago, and read it with surprise, admiration, and then pain. And then they think: “Fielding and Jane Austen and all the Brontës were already dead at the age I was when I wrote that – and so they didn’t have to find matter for a new novel in their sixties, seventies, eighties…”
More: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/allanmassie/100061155/novelists-used-to-die-young-now-they-must-confront-and-write-throughout-their-old-age/
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14/03/2012
Writing allows you to see through darkness
Writing in pursuit of truth lets you see through darkness.
"Once you have entered that dungeon, and raised your lamp, and seen the injustice residing in there, nothing can ever be the same again. No matter how far away you run, that image, that knowledge will be with you. And this is the difference between the true writer and the non-writer: The true writer cannot forget. The true writer in us will be haunted by that image until he or she writes about it. It will keep him awake at night; it will visit his waking hours. The writer is fascinated by evil, not mesmerised or attracted by it, but he is fascinated by it, by the fact of its existence, and by its sheer banality. It is a slippery slope, and we all stand on its edge. The writer is like that dragon slayer of legend who tirelessly seeks after dragons, from town to town, village to village, tormented by his passion; he knows that once he stops to rest, or to reflect on how perilous his vocation is, he will be overtaken by the very evil he seeks to exterminate.
How can literature act to increase our vision, to enlarge our sympathies? And this is where I want to make a link between literature and truth: truth as a concept has always existed side by side with fiction, way back to the earliest days of fiction. Before the advent of the novel, the English novel in particular, the dominant form of narrative was life writing, that is, biography and autobiography, or “histories” as they were then called. The earliest writers of the novel, in order to be taken seriously, pretended that their tales did actually happen (although in this deceit I like to imagine more the hand of printers and marketers than that of the authors themselves.)
The writer enlarges our sympathies by making us see ourselves better, but first he must see himself better in his own work. For regardless of how extroverted and socially oriented we may be in our writing, we write first and foremost for ourselves; we write to answer the most niggling questions bothering us, and so, in a way we are raising that lamp not just to see the poor boy in that dungeon, we are raising it to a mirror, to see ourselves."
More: http://dailytimes.com.ng/opinion/literature-way-seeing-12
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"Once you have entered that dungeon, and raised your lamp, and seen the injustice residing in there, nothing can ever be the same again. No matter how far away you run, that image, that knowledge will be with you. And this is the difference between the true writer and the non-writer: The true writer cannot forget. The true writer in us will be haunted by that image until he or she writes about it. It will keep him awake at night; it will visit his waking hours. The writer is fascinated by evil, not mesmerised or attracted by it, but he is fascinated by it, by the fact of its existence, and by its sheer banality. It is a slippery slope, and we all stand on its edge. The writer is like that dragon slayer of legend who tirelessly seeks after dragons, from town to town, village to village, tormented by his passion; he knows that once he stops to rest, or to reflect on how perilous his vocation is, he will be overtaken by the very evil he seeks to exterminate.
How can literature act to increase our vision, to enlarge our sympathies? And this is where I want to make a link between literature and truth: truth as a concept has always existed side by side with fiction, way back to the earliest days of fiction. Before the advent of the novel, the English novel in particular, the dominant form of narrative was life writing, that is, biography and autobiography, or “histories” as they were then called. The earliest writers of the novel, in order to be taken seriously, pretended that their tales did actually happen (although in this deceit I like to imagine more the hand of printers and marketers than that of the authors themselves.)
The writer enlarges our sympathies by making us see ourselves better, but first he must see himself better in his own work. For regardless of how extroverted and socially oriented we may be in our writing, we write first and foremost for ourselves; we write to answer the most niggling questions bothering us, and so, in a way we are raising that lamp not just to see the poor boy in that dungeon, we are raising it to a mirror, to see ourselves."
More: http://dailytimes.com.ng/opinion/literature-way-seeing-12
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