reading in all its glory
“The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. Spend more time thinking about the inputs.”
In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people.
Fully engaged, we work with the writer to build our own book.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.
As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
It is easy enough in retrospect to see a book as a screen, a shield, an escape, but at the time there was just the magic—the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements.
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: How to time travel, the power of reading, and being grateful when you don't have what you want
