#112 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday August 9)
Good morning!
This week is my mother’s birthday. Of my many memories of my mother, the greatest revolve around reading. The stories she read to us, her insistence we read, her buying sets of children’s and later young adults’ books that she insisted we read, the evenings in the family room, all of us reading, her membership in the Book of the Month Club, and the anthology Guy deMaupassant stories she won in the 30s for being the “best reader.” So today, in her memory, I thought I’d ruminate about reading…
Frederick Douglass and Reading
“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery…As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! That very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come…” --Frederick Douglass
“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.” –Carl Sagan
Reading and Giving Up on a Book
My reading regimen has remained fairly unchanged since I was a kid. With biography, I tend to speed through the person’s childhood, concentrating on what actually made them notable in later years. With nonfiction regarding current events, I find that by the middle of the book the same point is being made multiple times (word to the wise: you can get the gist of most of what you need from the NYT or WSJ book review and a careful reading of the first three chapters and the last). With history that touches on warfare, I tend to rush through detailed analyses of troop movements and detailed minute-by-minute descriptions of battles. I tend to read multiple books simultaneously. But most troubling about my reading habits is a stubborn reluctance to put down a book that I’m only marginally interested in. And when I trudge through the dying throes of the novel, my mind is elsewhere and I tend to slow down and not speed up. It hampers getting to the next book. But I’ve always been of the school of “finishing what you started.”
I felt better about my reading choices after Ron Cappello forwarded an article from Farnam Street (“helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out”). Here are some of the insights:
Quit books you don’t like. A good book will capture you immediately. Give up on those that don’t.
Read different pieces with different levels of intensity. Some is just to entertain. Some is to inform and you dive in and get out (I think this fits newspaper articles, commentary, and most contemporary non-fiction). The next level is “reading to understand,” to actually gain insight and challenge the words. Finally, there’s reading to master
Skim broadly to find something worth reading; then dive in slowly and deeply.
Read great books (often this means reading books that have stood the test of time).
Take notes (I’ll never do this—unless writing the Musings is what they had in mind).
I have just imagined a novel for which I have no more patience…!
Why Reading is Important
From GladReaders, Subodh Sharma lists 17 reasons why reading is important for everyone. Here they are (yes, there’s some overlap):
It helps you discover yourself
It imports valuable lessons from years of experience
It improves focus and concentration
It improves emotional health
It enhances memory
It is a source of motivation
It expands your knowledge and makes you smarter
It broadens imagination and enhances creativity
It makes one more empathetic
It reduces stress and improves sleep
It enhances critical and analytical thinking
It gives joy and pleasure
It makes you humble
It improves language command and vocabulary
It improves brain functions
Being lonely will not bother you so much
It makes you a better person
My First Memory (of Librarians)
--Nikki Giovanni
This is my first memory:
A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky
wood floor
A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center
Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply
too short
For me to sit in and read
So my first book was always big
In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided
To the left side the card catalogue
On the right newspapers draped over what looked like
a quilt rack
Magazines face out from the wall
The welcoming smile of my librarian
The anticipation in my heart
All those books—another world—just waiting
At my fingertips.
Finally, quotations on reading
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” –Ray Bradbury
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” –Fran Lebowitz
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest…of the past centuries.” –Rene Descartes
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” –Margaret Fuller
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” –Cicero
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” –Doctor Seuss
Have a great week,
Glenn
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