One of the best speeches I have heard. It speaks to me on so many levels.

Part 1

[This is for those of you who may not have been able to get the audio file I posted of this speech. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have over the last year.]

One of the best speeches I have heard. It speaks to me on so many levels.

Part 2

[This is for those of you who may not have been able to get the audio file I posted of this speech. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have over the last year.]

Quality time.

Quality time.

thatgirrlbrittni

Crazy Customers

  • Customer: Do you have a paperback copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?
  • Me: Yes we do (I proceed to get the book).
  • Customer: We walked out of the movie about mid-way through. It was way too graphic.
  • Me: Well, the book is more graphic and descriptive than the movie. Are you sure you want it?
  • Customer: Yeah, because when I read it, I'm not seeing it.
  • Me Wanting To Say: I guess that's true if you have absolutely no imagination.

630 plays

One of the best speeches I have heard. It speaks to me on so many levels.

[Is the sound/mp3 file working on this clip? Someone leave me a message and let me know. Thanks.]

Reading is a staple of life, like bread or water. Or chocolate.
 Rett MacPherson (A Misty Mourning)

booksandnerds

I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
Chaim Potok; The Chosen
“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.” ― Umberto Eco, PostScript to the Name of the Rose

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.” ― Umberto Eco, PostScript to the Name of the Rose

poetbabble:

In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them. - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Your very favorite librarian: More of Flavorwire's most beautiful bookstores.

yourveryfavoritelibrarian:

Love them…

Kníhkupectvo Martinus.sk, Bratislava, Slovakia [via]

Livraria Cultura, São Paulo, Brazil [via and via]

Academic Bookshop, Helsinki [via]

Massolit Books, Kraków, Poland [via and via]

Baldwin’s Book…

scribnerbooks: vintageanchor: “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” —Joan Didion, Blue Nights

scribnerbooks:

vintageanchor:

“Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
—Joan Didion, Blue Nights

vintageanchorbooks

The 10 Best Fictional Bookstores in Pop Culture

myimaginarybrooklyn:

It’s no secret that we love bookstores here at Flavorpill, but being as pop culture-minded as we are, we’ve found that we like the fictional shops almost as much as those we can visit in real life. One of our favorite bookstores on TV, Portlandia‘s Women & Women First, will soon be taking a vacation, so to console ourselves, we’ve created a list of our ten favorite fictional bookstores from all over pop culture. Now, we’ve limited ourselves to bookstores that are truly fictional, not just appearing in fiction — so the Travel Book Shop from Notting Hill and the defunct-but-actual shop at 84 Charing Cross Road are sadly both eliminated.

Don’t you realize that all great literature - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and The Charge of the Light Brigade - are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (via honeyforthehomeless)
bookpatrol: “Read a Fuc**ing Book” Sign in the window of Left Bank Books, Seattle

bookpatrol:

“Read a Fuc**ing Book” Sign in the window of Left Bank Books, Seattle

scribnerbooks:

The Art of Reading a Novel, or, Why Philip Roth Won’t Be Buying a Kindle

______________________________________

First, I think that Roth needs to qualify what he means by “a novel.” From this video, it seems he means a work of fiction that takes time to absorb, time to read, and effort to understand. Second, if that’s what he means then stories like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Brothers Karamazov, etc. will no longer be published. Third, if those are the novels that Roth is meaning, then the novel died in the mid-20th century, and Roth himself is not even writing those kinds of novels.

The novel is like water. It changes with the flow of time, what it’s running through or over, so to speak. The novel is also a reflection of culture. I think there will always be novels regardless of what media is out there to compete with it. Granted, Roth does make a strong point that it takes effort to read “novels”; works that take effort and time to absorb and understand. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s we had two of the media means that Roth discusses—Television and film. There were no video games, there were no home PCs, there was no internet, and there were no e-Readers. Also, television was limited to 4 channels—NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS. Because of that, I spent a great deal of my time reading.

Having been a teacher for 4 years, I can tell you the number of kids who read has decreased exponentially in the last three decades. Also, the internet, and I agree with Roth here, has caused our minds (especially the generation who is currently growing up with the internet from day one) to not be able to concentrate like it used to. Tumblr is a prime example. Whenever I post long articles (several paragraphs of written material) it gets less attention than the short quotes or pictures. Most of the really popular internet sights are set up to give small amounts of material in a very short space. We take these things at a rapid rate, never really needing to reflect (Facebook and especially Twitter are perfect examples of this). This, I think, is causing attention spans to wane. 

So on the one hand, Roth is correct, but on the other hand, because of this, the novel has changed. For example, some of the best novels today are stories that are a little shorter, or sometimes longer, but contain shorter chapters (shorter bits to take in over a longer space). Examples of this kind of material include works from J.M. Coetzee, Francine Prose, Jonathan Safran Foer, Cormac McCarthy, etc. Even Don Dellio has written shorter stories. So it’s not that the novel will disappear, it’s that it will need to adjust and change with the times as it has in the past. 

What do you think?