The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors
“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates — “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.” Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point. In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:
Brian Eno’s Reading List of Twenty Books Essential for Sustaining Human Civilization
By Maria Popova UPDATE: The folks from the Long Now have kindly asked me to contribute to the Manual for Civilization library — here is my own reading list. There is something inescapably alluring about the reading lists of cultural icons, perhaps because in recognizing that creativity is combinatorial and fueled by networked knowledge, we intuitively long to emulate the greatness of an admired mind by replicating the bits and pieces, in this case the ideas found in beloved books, that went into constructing it. After the reading lists of Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, Nick Cave, and David Bowie, now comes one from Brian Eno — pioneering musician, wise diarist, oblique strategist of creativity — compiled for the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization, a collaboratively curated library for long-term thinking. Join me in supporting the Manual for Civilization, then revisit Eno’s insights on art.
25 Essential Books That Every College Student Should Read
There is no college student who would like reading books, they say. Can you believe it? We hardly think so! Yes, reading is fashionable. books widen your vocabulary;books help students find new models for academic writing;books improve your cognitive skills;books expand your view of the world around;books let students remember grammar and punctuation rules autmatically;books help students learn a subject better;books help you avoid a social exclusion (according to this study of the Basic Skills Agency). Every college student has their own list of must-read, or at least must-check, books; but what if we tell you there are some writing masterpieces that are worth your attention and are essential for college students to read? 1. “You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.” This is a story about a relationship, a love triangle which subjects first met in college. 2. 3. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. 5. 6. 7.
bookleteer
Publish Books Instantly From Evernote
It’s never been easier to be an author. Evernote is an especially popular tool for many writers. It serves as the place to collect, find, and organize source material, archival information, and photographs. For many authors, Evernote is the place where ideas are assembled into words and manufactured into stories. Now, with an integration by FastPencil, authors have a full-fledged tool to create and distribute a book in Evernote, from start to publish. Here’s all you need to know to turn your Evernote notes into published content with FastPencil: Create. Review. Publish. Distribute. Evernote is a great resource to capture ideas and write, but with this integration from FastPencil, it’s a powerful new tool to format, structure and print your content and share it with the world. What will you write and publish with Evernote?
One Sentence - True stories, told in one sentence.
Why Readers, Scientifically, Are The Best People To Fall In Love With
Ever finished a book? I mean, truly finished one? Cover to cover. Closed the spine with that slow awakening that comes with reentering consciousness? You take a breath, deep from the bottom of your lungs and sit there. You’re grateful, thoughtful, pensive. Like falling in love with a stranger you will never see again, you ache with the yearning and sadness of an ended affair, but at the same time, feel satisfied. This type of reading, according to TIME magazine’s Annie Murphy Paul, is called “deep reading,” a practice that is soon to be extinct now that people are skimming more and reading less. Readers, like voicemail leavers and card writers, are now a dying breed, their numbers decreasing with every GIF list and online tabloid. The worst part about this looming extinction is that readers are proven to be nicer and smarter than the average human, and maybe the only people worth falling in love with on this shallow hell on earth. Did you ever see your ex with a book?
Unusual, Neglected and/or Lost Literature
[ home ] Major update during Aug.-Oct. 2014. Quite a bit of new material that's of course not marked in any way as the newer stuff so you'll just have to poke around. Major update during Nov. 2008 including reformatting (e.g. what was I thinking using all those HTML lists?) Contained herein are links and books in my personal collection (well, a few aren't...yet) in the general category of unusual literature, for which the best definition I can come up with at the moment is: stuff I like that's a little or a lot different than most of the stuff you'll find down at the local Books'R'Us. I guess the ultimate goal is to provide somewhere for myself and others of my particular bent (and I use that word very deliberately) to go to find something to read during those times when the usual fodder just isn't satisfying the need, as well as to provide a web presence for the writings of obscure/unusual authors who deserve wider recognition. Enjoy. Meta, i.e. The Compulsive Reader Meta-Books Authors J.
The world's most difficult books: how many have you read?
'Fantastically convoluted' … Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Photograph: Oscar White/Corbis Two and a half. The pair started their quest to identify the toughest books out there back in 2009, looking for "books that are hard to read for their length, or their syntax and style, or their structural and generic strangeness, or their odd experimental techniques, or their abstraction". Anyway, they've now picked the most difficult of the most difficult – the 10 "literary Mount Everests waiting out there for you to climb, should you be so bold" – and have laid them out for discussion at Publishers Weekly. The titles? There are a few other books I might include in the list – Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and if I was going to choose Woolf, I'd go for The Waves. I'm not sure, if I'm honest, that I'm going to increase this measly total. How about you?
