Hmm…

Tag: reading

  • Books, Books, Books!

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    A logical follow-up to last week’s post about libraries is have one celebrating books. Here is a bit of verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning – I quoted her once before in ‘From Recluse to Romance,’ which was part of my Real-life Romance series. I haven’t actually read much of her work, because of my somewhat…

  • Oh, Libraries!

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    “Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow, in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”, from Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984) I once made an acquaintance with a man who had the most amazing library. It wasn’t the biggest library…

  • The Dangerous Business of Recommending Novels

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    And the Dangerous Business of Reading Recommendations Someone lends you a book, telling you it’s “fantastic,” “will change your life forever,” or that you “have to read it.” You take and swear you’ll read it. Then it sits on your bookshelf for the next twelve months, while you stare at it and promise yourself you…

  • I Need to Read More Books

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    by

    harmamae
    in ,

    If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you’ve probably started to see a pattern. I know I have, from writing it. The same books keep coming up over and over. If you were to take a guess at which books exactly were my favourite, what would you come up with? Say Lord of the…

  • Why You Read, Why I Write:

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    “To some degree, we thrust ourselves into the hands of a storyteller, trusting that he will deliver us safely from a daydream that swiftly turns into a nightmare.” (The Passive Voice, quoting David Farland) What should stories do – teach us something about reality, or allow us to escape from reality? Those that are more…

  • A Thought From C.S. Lewis – On Reading the Classics

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”          – C.S. Lewis (full text found here) Very…

  • The Lesser Known Works of the Better Known Writers

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    Or, Wait–She Wrote That?  Sometimes an author is so good you want to read everything they wrote–so you go out and read every single thing on their list of publications. You know, like when you finish Lord of the Rings and go out and find The Silmarillion (somewhat of an interesting surprise for people!) Sometimes…

  • The Pleasures of Re-Reading

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    by

    harmamae
    in , ,

    Or, Surprise! I Actually Like This Book Some novels can stand up to the pressures of being re-read over and over – Lord of the Rings, Howl’s Moving Castle, Pride and Prejudice – and get better and better each time I read them. To come back to them is like finding a comfortable old friend,…

  • It’s the Readers’ Fault! Why Bad Writing is Called Good

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    by

    harmamae
    in ,

    OR: Don’t Blame Them, They Didn’t Notice the Difference Anyway Authors agonize over metaphors. They might spend ages debating word choice. They careful revise their sentence structure. What would you say if someone told you readers rarely notice this kind of thing anyway? I’m a poor student, and like many a poor student I participate…