Author: harmamae
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Tell Me About Your Favourite Bookstore
Last Friday The Guardian published a wonderful list of bookstores worldwide – including one from Canada, woohoo! Any book-lover knows there is no shortage of lovable bookstores out there, so which is your favourite? I’d have to say, from The Guardian‘s list, I want to visit the bookstore-in-a-van that sells Portuguese books translated into English.…
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Do Spoilers Spoil Stories?
Spoilers ruin everything. They rip out ask the suspense and enjoyment, they wreck– Wait, you’re saying people actually like a work MORE if it’s been spoiled for them? Are you serious? This is what Derek Thompson argues in “In Defense of Spoilers.” Apparently, anticipation of a twist can take away our enjoyment of the parts…
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Useful Words English Doesn’t Have
Anyone who’s ever started learning another language has come across words that just don’t translate into English. My favorites are ‘saudades,’ from Portuguese (meaning a feeling of longing, melancholy or nostalgia), and ‘gezellig,’ from Dutch (meaning a nice atmosphere, but also belonging and time spent with loved ones). Today, Slate published an excerpt from Lost…
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Do You Hear Voices In Your Head? (While Reading)
Do you hear voices in your head? When you’re reading, I mean. Of course I mean when you’re reading. I’m not trying to suggest anyone is crazy… I mean, do you hear voices of narrators and characters speaking out loud in your head when you’re reading? I’d never thought about this before. I’m struggling to…
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Independent Bookstores Have NOT Disappeared–They’re Doing Fine, Actually
So it was bad news for a while for independent bookstores–you know, those tiny neighbourhood shops crowded with books and run by a dedicated owner or two. Chain bookstores were swallowing up their business left and right. Thousands closed as big-box retailers like Barnes & Noble and Borders took over (or Chapters and Indigo bookstores,…
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Do You Use ‘Alot’ A Lot?
Hopefully you realized there were two spelling of ‘a lot’ up there in my title, and hopefully you also realized one of them was not grammatically correct. Why not grammatically correct, you ask? I don’t know – the spaces lobby argued we should all use the space bar on our keyboards more often? That is why…
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In Defense of Typing
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Was not my last post about handwriting? How handwriting stimulates creativity and word productivity? Very true, but since then I’ve run across the article, ‘The Joy of Typing,’ which strikes back at the idea that typing reduces the quality of your thought. Typing, the author Clive Thompson argues, does not make us…
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I Handwrite My Fiction, But I’m Not Stuck in the Dark Ages – I’ll Prove It
Remember back in November I said I managed to spew out 50,000 words in a month in order to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? Well, I may not have mentioned those were handwritten words, so really my total of 50,000 was a guesstimate. I have recently been occupied in typing these words up.…
Hmm... 