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9256e98
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Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als waren es unsere eigenen.
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reading
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Alberto Manguel |
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ad59051
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Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.
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literature
reading
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Alberto Manguel |
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311cc4d
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They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids' adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment... She'd been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn't her favor-ite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn't she just read the fucking thing with gusto and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids' book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.
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reading
life
kid
judgment
hero
child
childhood
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Maile Meloy |
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eac4a31
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I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed until the reader fell into it and skittered right to the end without stopping. The relief of being in someone else's hands. Yes, exactly: I needed to be under a spell....it didn't matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I'm sure it didn't matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later--I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or in this case, guardians of my peace. They were the authors of this opportunity--diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I'd found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn't disturb me until closing time.
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reading
peace
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Marilyn Johnson |
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ed63d46
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The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.
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reading
imagination
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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93f7104
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Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries--Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Cafe Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Cafe Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.
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reading
books
love
collecting-books
knowledge
obsession
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Stefan Zweig |
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ecd81d0
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I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter.
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reading
books
burnout
ennui
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Katherine Dunn |
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1845069
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Il senso di calore che avvertii la prima volta che tenni un libro in mano, prima ancora di aprirlo, non mi ha mai abbandonato. Cominciai a leggere voracemente, tutto e di tutto, e poco dopo aver finito un libro ne iniziavo un altro. Passavo da Beatrix Potter a A.A. Milne e a J.D. Salinger; da Harold Robbins a Hemingway e Dostoevskij; da Anna Frank a John Steinbeck e Proust; da Leon Uris a Isaac Bashevis Singer e Gertrude Stein, ad infinitum. Ero entrata in una compagnia di sconosciuti, e da allora ho sempre seguito il cammino che hanno tracciato per me. I loro pensieri mi hanno condotto a scoprire altri significati nei miei. Mi ha sempre colpito come un libro parli all'altro, ampliandone il significato.
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reading
libri
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Bernice Eisenstein |
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31e04c6
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Don't let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it's a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.
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words
reading
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Gregory Maguire |
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889e550
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Read liberal and conservative news sources; business, history, religion. All of this creates a renaissance persona that can stand toe-to-toe with any Fortune 500 executive. Get a nice suit and wear it; don't see yourself as a blown-in hayseed. View yourself as a modern Jeffersonian intellectual agrarian. What's on your bookshelf? How many hours a week do you read? Readers are leaders. Cultivate friendships across disciplines, politics, and religion. Entertain guests often; that's a cheap way to receive cosmopolitan information without having to travel.
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reading
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Joel Salatin |
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a4c3e69
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As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.
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reading
reflection
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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b3545ff
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Times change and discoveries are made that render earlier techniques and approaches less effective. Change is inevitable. To remain rigid when the whole world is changing and advancing is to invite misfortune. The AA program in particular is challenged with an opportunity of unprecedented magnitude.
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opportunity
reading
writing
change
alcoholics-anonymous
addiction
addiction-cure
addiction-treatment
chris-prentiss
challenge
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Chris Prentiss |
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af28fac
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It'll be dark soon, Rudy.' He walked on. 'So what?' 'I'm going back.' Rudy stopped and watched her now as if she were betraying him. 'That's right, book thief. Leave me now. I bet if there was a lousy book at the end of this road, you'd keep walking. Wouldn't you?
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reading
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Markus Zusak |
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323aa4e
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I began by making assumptions about the stories Borges chose for me -- that Kipling's prose would be stilted, Stevenson's childish, Joyce's unintelligible -- buy very soon prejudice gave way to experience, and the discovery of one story gave way to another.
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prejudice
reading
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Alberto Manguel |
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cfd8cfa
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The fine and varied literature that I read was almost all in translation: from classic works by Jack London, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, to detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, not to mention fascinating pornographic books. I also appreciated the biblical stories that contained all three genres.
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reading
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Shlomo Sand |
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1a49aaf
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She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
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reading
nineteenth-century
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Kate Atkinson |
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aaee389
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The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of--then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.
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libraries
library
reading
library-books
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Caitlin Moran |
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cbabddd
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I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book.
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reading
books
history-of-love
nicole-krauss
book
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Nicole Krauss |
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2c919e5
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If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.
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reading
disability
social-networking
media
technology
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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377651d
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He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.
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reading
p-g-wodehouse
parsons
science-fiction
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John Updike |
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7e72c63
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The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.
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reading
maturation
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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799e843
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I know you read very widely. Almost like cultural foraging.
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reading
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Clifford Ross |
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81017db
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Like the vacationer who returns to a beloved summer house year after year, the addicted reader opens book three or four or eleven in a given series and is thoroughly at home in the locale--its by now familiar native characters, the verbal shrubbery and the narrative floorboards that occasionally creak.
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literature
reading
series-books
mysteries
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Selma G. Lanes |