Keith Oatley is a novelist and professor of cognitive psychology at the Univeristy of Toronto. He has some remakable things to say about the act of reading. His book, Such Stuff as Dreams suggests that when we read, our brains interpret social interactions in a work of fiction as the real thing – as far as [...]
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. . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England (to read more about me see my About page).
It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and currently receives over 10,000 unique visitors each month. So far 288 book reviews have been published. My currently-reading shelf:  This website is archived for posterity in the British Library's UK Web Archive 
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Elif Batuman’s book of essays, The Possessed, loosely based on the joys of reading classic Russian literature, turns out to be a bit of a hodge-podge of travel-writing, literary criticism and a personal reading history, enlivened by a butterfly mind that flutters from one subject to another without really landing for too long on any [...] On Reading – Proust I’ve building up quite a collection of books on the topic of reading and was pleased to have the opportunity of reading this new Hesperus Press volume On Reading containing Proust’s Introduction, to his translation of John Ruskin’s book Sesame and Lilies. Marcel Proust was a great admirer of the [...] A bridge into the woods This summer is being incredibly busy, what with the (very welcome) involvement in the lives of our two grand-daughters, preparations for our son’s wedding, various relatives visiting us, and more travelling. I have therefore decided to take a break from writing reviews until the autumn. One or two new [...] Seasonal weather in Sussex 2010 was a good year for A Common Reader, apart from a blip in October/November when I suddenly got a touch of writer’s block. Fortunately it soon went and I’ve been back writing again for a few weeks now. This year I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of review titles and [...] Mrs Common Reader and I been looking after our little grand-daugther this week as she’s got Rubella and can’t go to her nursery. Reading has had to come second to dressing dollies and pushing shapes through holes. However, this morning, I’m grabbing the chance to scribble a few lines before Grandpa duties commence. Reading a [...] Stu, of Winstonsdad’s Blog has a copy of Edith Grossman’s highly-regarded translation of Don Quixote and is proposing a “readalong” starting in late summer this year (2010). The idea is to read the book together and publish blog posts about the experience. I bought this book pretty much when it came out in 2004 [...] A short report in The Guardian on Saturday on a survey conducted by the National Reading Campaign tells us that lower income, non-professional families see readers as losers and loners, people who “don’t know how to live . . . an alien and unexciting tribe they seldom meet”. I think I kind of guessed that [...] I am always interested in the way reading affects people, and also in the psychology of the German people in the build-up to the Second World War. Timothy Ryback has studied the remnants of Hitler’s private library, some 1200 books, which occupy shelf-space in the rare book division of the Library of Congress in Washington. [...] In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the reading brain, describes how our brains manage to read. Reading is not an innate activity, but it is an invention, and only a few thousand years old at that. It does not come naturally to humans [...] |
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