Beatrix Potter got her poetry from prose: which is to say, from speech, concentrated. Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Reading Related'
Beatrix Potter – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 4th, 2011 · No Comments · Parenting, Reading Related
Grammar and Reading – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 2nd, 2011 · No Comments · Elitism, Reading Related
As Kingsley Amis acutely noted, the person who uses “disinterested” for “uninterested” is unlikely to see your article complaining about the point, because the person has never been much of a reader anyway.
The Challenges of Reading Gibbon – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
October 1st, 2011 · No Comments · Civilisation, Culture, History, Reading Related, Writing
There was never much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn’t work like that and neither does prose. But there is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should [...]
Tags:Grammar·Plain English·reading·Sentence Structure·writing
Writing and Memory – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James
September 28th, 2011 · No Comments · Admin, Culture, Reading Related, Writing
I would never have taken a note in the first place except out of the fear that what I was reading would soon slip away: a fear all too well founded. The Russian symbolist writer Andrei Bely once said that what we keep in our heads is the sum of a writer: a “composite quotation.” [...]
Tags:reading
Books and Cross Cultural Understanding – “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” – Barbara Demick
September 20th, 2011 · No Comments · Culture, Fiction, History, Humanism, Reading Related, Totalitarianism
At the University, behind the librarian’s desk, was a small selection of Western books that had been translated into Korean. They were forbidden to the general public; only top students could have access to them. At some high level of the government, somebody had decided that the nation needed an intellectual elite with some knowledge [...]
Tags:Books·capitalism·literature·North Korea·reading·totalitarianism
Reading Below Your Level – “Up in the Air” – Walter Kirn
July 8th, 2011 · No Comments · Quotes, Reading Related
Alex leafs through an issue of Cosmopolitan, which seems beneath her, though I do the same thing: read below my level while in flight.
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On the Natural Superiority of Books as a Cultural Form – “The Polysyllabic Spree”, Nick Hornby
May 30th, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related, Writing
One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as [...]
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On Reading Long Books – “The Polysyllabic Spree”, Nick Hornby
May 30th, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related
‘We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes – usually late at night, in bed – he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I [...]
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Reading is a Domestic Activity – “The Polysyllabic Spree”, Nick Hornby
May 29th, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related
Reading is a domestic activity and is therefore susceptible to any changes in the domestic environment.
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Buying Books – “The Polysyllabic Spree”, Nick Hornby
May 29th, 2011 · No Comments · Reading Related
‘I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read and didn’t list’
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