Hanging out on the internet

The average reader is pleased to observe anybody’s wooden leg being stolen.

Flannery O’Connor, with what continues to strike me as an incredibly succinct and useful piece of plot advice. (via mttbll) That entire essay (“Writing Short Stories,” collected in Mystery and Manners), is the most refreshing tonic. (via sarahwrotethat)

(via sarahwrotethat)

lit

If you’re trying to raise a reader, you need your library. It’s too expensive and somewhat wasteful to buy the hundreds of books a young reader goes through in those first years of learning to read.

Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading: Select quotes from parents and library staff (via pewinternet)

(via pewresearch)

Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is “known” from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers.

from The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific American

(This entirely piece is fascinating.)

I’m reading this great piece at The Millions about The Point of the Paperback, and I love the section about the transformation many books make between hardcover and paperback.

Some, like those at the top of this photo series, change a lot:

“It seems that almost every book these days gets a new cover for the paperback. It’s almost as if they’re doing two different books for two different audiences, with the paperback becoming the ‘book club book,’” says Melanie Benjamin, author of The Aviator’s Wife. Benjamin watched the covers of her previous books, including Mrs. Tom Thumb and Alice I Have Been, change from hardcovers that were “beautiful, and a bit brooding” to versions that were “more colorful, more whimsical.”

Others, like The Buddha in the Attic, play with original elements, or, like Wild, stay pretty much the same.

“Often by the time the paperback rolls around, both the author and publicist will have realized where the missed opportunities were for the hardcover, and have a chance to correct that,” says Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Knight. “Once your book has been focus-grouped on the biggest stage — hardcover publication — you get a sense of the qualities that resonate most with people, and maybe those were not the qualities you originally emphasized in hardcover. So you alter the flap copy, you change the cover art to reflect the best response from the ideal readership, and in many cases, the author can prepare original material to speak to that audience.”

The rest of the piece is really interesting — read it here.

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books

theparisreview:

“What does it mean not to finish a book? To lose interest, steam, momentum? When distraction leads to forgotten plots, characters, and themes who suffers, the reader or the book left unread?” The secret lives of unfinished books.

I will say, I find it much easier to put down non-fiction books than fiction (or as the piece says, let them “carry on without me”), mostly because of this same feeling:

My first impulse when I began this post was to anthropomorphize, to wonder what happened to the characters when tossed aside. Do they remain suspended—in a kitchen, at a wedding, in the throes of heartbreak—or do they continue on alone to an autonomous finish? That might be a silly thing to think about, like a 10-year-old with a developing consciousness or one who’s seen too many Disney films. But it puts things in perspective.

Books do not need you. They repeat their stories every night.

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theparisreview:

Source: The New York Public Library. (Via)

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It’s hard to predict how actual books are going to do but I’m not freaked out about ebooks taking over. I think there are probably more active readers now because of computers and iPhones or what-have-you. One thing that is sometimes forgotten in this “future of books” discussion is that there are all these awesome presses—big and small—that are producing and designing amazing books. Everyone from Chronicle and McSweeney’s to Ugly Duckling Presse, Rose Metal, Spork, Poor Claudia, and countless other folks who make books that are like art. People who love to letterpress their own covers and use thread and needle to sew their very own books. It’s a crazy and beautiful part of the book world that a lot of people don’t really know about.

Powell’s Bookseller, Author & Publisher Kevin Sampsell

wnycradiolab:

explore-blog:

Kurt Vonnegut’s classic lecture on the shapes of stories, now in an infographic.

We talk about these Vonnegut graphs all the time at Radiolab, but we usually just scribble them on a coffee-stained napkin. This is much nicer.