Books: A Living History. By Maria Popova From book-burning to the iPad, or what Pompeii has to do with Gutenberg and the future of reading. Books are a tremendous presence and inspiration around here — we’ve previously explored how they’ve been made from the Middle Ages to today, what the future might have in store for them, and why analog books still enchant us. In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books. It is difficult now to imagine how some of the great turning points in Western history could have been achieved without [the book]. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment all relied on the printed word for their spread and permanent influence.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Jitterbug Perfume (9780553348989): Tom Robbins. Why that book changed your life | Afterword. The claim that a book can change someone’s life is one that’s made over and over again. Usually, we brush it aside as a cliché, but what if it was actually possible? The question of the psychology of fiction is one that Keith Oatley, professor emeritus in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, has been working on for 20 years. He and some colleagues started the website On Fiction in 2008 to track work related to the psychology of fiction. “The idea was to say, ‘OK, now what really are the psychological effects of reading?’ ” Oatley says. To try and work out an answer, he and Maja Djikic put together a study to measure how personalities can be changed by literature. “The people who read the Chekhov story, their personalities all changed a bit,” Oatley says. But what sets literature, and especially narrative fiction, apart from other genres is that everyone’s personality changed a different way.
5 (More) Must-Read Books by TED 2011 Speakers. By Maria Popova What information curators have to do with the revenge of technology and synesthetic autism. We spent the past week in sleep deprivation and intellectual overstimulation so you wouldn’t have to, reporting from TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder and bringing back the most noteworthy highlights, soundbites and exclusive photos. Last week, we warmed up with 5 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, and today we’re back with five more. The pleasure of being right is one of the most universal human addictions and most of us spend an extraordinary amount of effort on avoiding or concealing wrongness. But error, it turns out, isn’t wrong. However disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.” ~ Kathryn Schulz As information continues to proliferate, how we sift and filter it is of increasing importance in making sense of the world and framing what matters in it.
Donating = Loving. 7 Must-Read Books on Time. By Maria Popova What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels. Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science.
Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? And today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art. It comes as no surprise to start with A Brief History of Time — legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterpiece, which is commonly considered the most important book in popular science ever published and one of our 10 essential primers on (almost) everything. Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending: 10 Novels That We Dare You to Finish.