One Sentence - True stories, told in one sentence.
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. I have read two and a half of the 10 most difficult books ever written, as selected by Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg of the Millions after three years' research. 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. How about you?
Psychologists Find a Surprising Thing Happens to Kids Who Read Harry Potter
The news: Harry Potter's greatest feat might not have been defeating Voldemort, but teaching young people around the world to battle prejudice. At least that's the finding of a new paper in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, which claims reading the Harry Potter series significantly improved young peoples' perception of stigmatized groups like immigrants, homosexuals or refugees. The studies: The Pacific Standard broke down the three studies used in this paper. The first took 34 Italian fifth-graders and plunged them into a six-week course on Potter. A second study with 117 Italian high school students found that a reader's emotional identification with Harry was associated with more positive perceptions of LGBT people in general. In all three studies, the researchers credited the books with improving the readers' ability to assume the perspective of marginalized groups. Image Credit: AP Tom McKay
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?), many new entries, and adding new material to old entries (although I've not yet found the motivation to check for all the dead links). 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've chosen/pinched/pilfered reviews basedly almost entirely on their informational content rather than their opinion of the book, on the theory that the more you know about the author and the book the more you'll be able to appreciate it. Enjoy. Meta, i.e. Meta-Books Authors
Virtual Domicile of Steven K. Baum
The Science Behind Fonts (And How They Make You Feel)
I’ve noticed how seemingly small things like font and the spacing between letters can impact how I feel when reading online. The right font choice along with the absence of sidebars and popups makes everything feel easier and better to read. Websites like Medium, Signal vs. Noise, and Zen Habits are like yoga studios for content. Their presentation of content puts me at peace while reading, allowing me to fully focus on the stories without distraction. Just look at the difference between Medium and Cracked: Exhibit A) Medium.com Exhibit B) Cracked.com When you compare the two, it’s obvious which one makes you feel like crud. The Cracked layout is painful to look at. After experimenting with how we display content on the ooomf blog, I discovered there’s an element of science behind why we feel this way toward certain typefaces and layouts. How we read When we read, our eyes follow a natural pattern called a Scan Path. We break sentences up into scans (saccades) and pauses (fixations). 1. 2. 3.
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
by Maria Popova How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.” “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge — our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms knowledge — like we cling to life itself. And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the knowable. HT Bobulate Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times
Bounderby is a successful capitalist who owns a factory and a bank in Coketown. He brags about having grown up an orphan, and marries Louisa Gradgrind hoping to make her a trophy wife. In the end, she leaves him, his stories about his childhood turn out to be lies, and he dies of a fit in the street. The novel doesn't really beat around the bush with this one. Bounderby is awful. And yet, Bounderby is actually just one giant contradiction. Yes, it turns out that Bounderby actually grew up in a normal, loving, probably over-indulgent family that helped him get a start in life. Josiah Bounderby Timeline
6 Things No One Ever Tells You About Living Abroad
My senior year of college, I decided I wasn’t ready to “grow up”, “settle down”, or take part in the “real world.” I wanted to see what else the world had to offer before I settled into a 9-5 routine and became a boring old adult. At the ripe age of 21, bachelor degree in hand, I moved from suburban Connecticut to Ireland to work as an au pair for a year. It’s been six months now since I took that leap, and I’ve learned more than I could ever condense into one article. 1. So you’ve decided to move to another country? 2. At this point in time, I think everyone and their mother knows that long distance relationships aren’t easy. 3. People always talk about how much traveling changes you. 4. Nothing makes you feel more like a helpless child than sickness. 5. Moving to another country requires sacrifice. 6. One of my main reasons for running away to Ireland was to avoid growing up.
