A Slow-Books Manifesto - Maura Kelly - Entertainment. Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics. Reuters Everywhere you look these days, there's a new "slow" movement. I'm all for efforts like these. That's why I'm calling for a Slow Books Movement (one that's a little more developed than this perfectly admirable attempt). In our leisure moments, whenever we have down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else.
To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. Aim for 30 minutes a day. But Slow Books will have standards about what kinds of reading materials count towards your daily quota. Also excluded: non-literary books. Why the emphasis on literature? Literature doesn't just make us smarter, however; it makes us us, shaping our consciences and our identities.
With empathy comes self-awareness, of course. Best of all, perhaps, serious reading will make you feel good about yourself. Yeast Genetics in ‘The Marriage Plot’ - Scientist Was Fiction, but Not His Work. Work in Progress » Blog Archive » Jeffrey Eugenides Answers Readers’ Questions. Jeffrey Eugenides stopped by the FSG offices a couple weeks ago, in advance of his book tour for The Marriage Plot. We used the opportunity to let his Facebook fans ask a few questions, some of which are featured in the video below. Q. In the introduction for My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead you speak of the concept of a “love story” and provide a selection of short stories in that vein. Which novels do you believe also fit the mold of a “love story,” and did they influence your writing of The Marriage Plot? The novels that influenced The Marriage Plot were mainly the English novels that contained the marriage plot.
I’m actually not an expert on Jane Austen at all—though Madeleine Hanna, the heroine of the book, is—but the books that I thought of, that I had most in mind were Anna Karenina and Portrait of a Lady. That’s probably the main model for my book. Q. They should be eating, sleeping, or walking the dog.
I think that’s true. I had to learn lots of new things in order to write it. Q.