@suroora, this one's for you! And for other photophiles among this group of bibliophiles! Discovered on Swiss TV news yesterday evening: choose your top 10 books, add a bit of "mise en scène", photograph and share. This is the brainchild of an independent bookseller in a small Swiss city (started in the run-up to the …
Continue reading Heresy on a Book Blogging Site, Or: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others. "For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now …
Neil Gaiman's impassioned talk on the importance of reading and daydreaming as a gateway to our imaginations. I feel I could have written this (though not quite so eloquently) in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. I'm sure a lot of you do too. He says that he attended a talk …
Continue reading Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
The challenge for 2014 is to widen our reading horizons. To do this, we're forming a group of readers who will, between us, attempt to read a book from nearly every country in the world. The list of countries with suggested/potential authors has been created as a Google doc. The link will be emailed to …
Thought I'd share the NYT's list of notable books of 2013. I've just read one: Kate Atkinson's Life after Life. But have a few of these on my list. Thanks, Kris and Joannah, for sharing this. Image: John Kelly
My dear reading compatriots: I would like to propose something of a challenge. While I don't know the range of linguistic abilities among us, having never met the majority of you, I wonder if it would be possible for us as a group to undertake the same sort of challenge as BBC's Ann Morgan. Would …
Talking About Books 