Reading Matters

Posted by Cyn

You must read, Alice, before it’s too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past; the more the bet­ter. These images, apart from any­thing else, will help you put the two and twos of life together, and the more images your mind retains, the more won­der­ful will be the star-​​studded canopy of expe­ri­ence beneath which you, poor prim­i­tive crea­ture that you are, will shel­ter; the nearer you will creep to the great blaz­ing bea­con of the Idea which ani­mates us all.
 — Fay Wel­don, Let­ters to Alice: On First Read­ing Jane Austen

I read. I read a lot. I read while stand­ing in line any­where, while eat­ing (unless I have some­one to talk to, of course), any time my eyes aren’t required to do some­thing else. I almost always have sev­eral books in progress and keep one in my purse and at least one backup in the car. I don’t read as many peri­od­i­cals as I once did, but with blogs and such, I read more than ever!

I learned to read fairly early, thanks to my won­der­ful mother who read to me and my sib­lings (and my daugh­ter!). After find­ing me puz­zling over her old high school lit­er­a­ture book at age 6, try­ing to make sense of Beowulf, 1 she began patiently cart­ing me back and forth to the library at least once a week. She encour­aged a love of the writ­ten word that drove me to improve my read­ing skills, and I credit any aca­d­e­mic (or other) suc­cess to that skill more than any other. Katie and I spent a lot of time read­ing together when she was younger, until she became a con­fi­dent reader on her own. She’s an avid reader now, and takes a book with her every­where just as I do.

Since the writ­ten word is so impor­tant to me, it’s only rea­son­able that I have parts of my site ded­i­cated to it. I enter new books that I read and books that I plan to read into Now Read­ing, a mar­velous Word­Press plug-​​in by Rob Miller. It cre­ates a nice list of books that you can view or search. There are pages for each of the books on the list, and if I’ve writ­ten a review it’ll either be there or linked from that page. I’ve been try­ing to go back and add links to the authors’ web sites as much as pos­si­ble. There’s usu­ally a link to Amazon’s list­ing for the books, too.

Edit: Now Read­ing stopped work­ing when I upgraded to ver­sion 2.6 of Word­Press. After over a month of try­ing to con­tact the author, I finally gave up and started mov­ing my records to Good Reads. I’ll even­tu­ally get the reviews and such moved over, or at least linked there, if they allow that.

We’ve listed most of the books (and music and movies) we own in a Read­er­ware data­base. I just can’t rec­om­mend that soft­ware highly enough! It can export a nice list of the books, which I keep intend­ing to upload here. If I were smarter, I’d fig­ure out how to make it work with Good Reads. Someday!

I used to write a lot of poetry and short sto­ries, but most of that has been lost to time. If any­one out there has any fic­tion or poetry that I shared with you at some time, I’d really appre­ci­ate a copy.

There are a few authors who I love so much that I’ve made pages with sam­ples of their poetry. I post pieces by other poets from time to time in my blog here. There are also a fair num­ber of poetry posts in my Live­Jour­nal that haven’t been posted here (yet).

Finally, these are some pieces I find inspirational.

1 What can I say? I was really bored dur­ing sum­mer break between first and sec­ond grades. Unfor­tu­nately, my par­ents’ home con­tains very few books other than the Bible, children’s books, and (when I was lit­tle, at least) a cou­ple of Mom’s old text­books and an set of World Book ency­clo­pe­dias from around 1960. The ency­clo­pe­dias are long gone. They don’t even own bookshelves!

Permalink | February 2nd, 2008

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