Content tagged with “reading” under “My Library”

“This is a very light, fun book that profiles 100 famous works from history and why they matter – what larger life lesson can we draw from them. Each work is given a quick summary of both the plot and the lesson. For example, here’s Crime and Punishment (a book I did not care for, incidentally):…”

“I really tried with this book, but I had to abandon it. This is one of those books that doesn’t really have a point. It’s just a meandering journey through one guy’s love of bookshops around the world. He apparently visited 1,000 of them. I read his Wikipedia page , where I found this: He uses to…”

“This is exactly what it promised – a long, detailed history of libraries, from scrolls in chests to books on the shelves. Libraries really started with the church. They were first repositories of books, and they grew from there. Back in the day, books were expensive because mass printing was in its…”

“This is a classic instruction manual that does what it says on the cover – it explains the different ways one might read a book. Specifically, there are four levels: Elementary Reading Inspectional Reading (divided into Skimming or Prereading, and Superficial Reading) Analytical Reading Synoptical…”

“Lovely coffee table picture book of independent bookstores from around the world. The writer/photographer spent a lot of time in several major cities – San Francisco, NYC, London, Paris, Vienna, and some smaller cities in Germany, Portugal and The Netherlands. Each bookstore gets a small essay from…”

“I didn’t love this book. Note that the author is claiming the 100 ‘most influential’ books, not the best (which is subjective anyway). I got annoyed with the arrogance of the author. He writes with a palpable disdain for anything he doesn’t like, particularly religion. (I mean, we get it – you’re…”

“Kind of an odd book, honestly. It’s really a meditation on reading in all its forms. Each chapter covers a different aspect of reading: Being Read To, The Author As Reader, etc. What it didn’t seem to be was an actual ‘history of reading,’ as the title suggested. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s…”

“This was written in 1994, just when the web and hypertext were showing up. The author is concerned about a diminishing ability of students to read long-form, static text. In addition to hypertext, he points to DVD and audiobooks. Clearly, his perspective would be wildly different now. ebooks didn’t…”

“An interesting guide to how to interpret fiction. You know those classes in college where the professor talked and talked about a book and got so many weird interpretations of it that you were wondering if you had read the same book? Well, this book tries to give you some insight on that process….”