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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 [...] 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 [...]
I am used to hearing how books educate, inform and enlighten and it was a surprise to read that the wholly unenlightened Adolf Hitler was “possessed by a voracious appetite for reading”. From his earliest years after returning from the First World War battle-front in France, Hitler scoured the book-stalls of Munich to fill two book cases in his rented rooms. He read “intently, even fiercely”, usually late into the night, and Ryback records an occasion when Eva Braun interrupted a reading session and was “dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway”. Associates recalled, “I can never remember Adolf without books”, and “books were his world”, with reading being a “deadly serious business”. A list exists of Hitler’s borrowings from a right-wing lending library in Munich and shows that between 1919 and 1921, he borrowed over a hundred entries ranging from early church history to first-hand accounts of the Russian revolution. The list includes an large number anti-Semitic texts such as “The International Jew – The Worlds Foremost Problem”, “Luther and the Jews” and many others. Continue reading Review: Hitler’s Private Library – Timothy W Ryback
The book is divided into three parts. Firstly the history of how humans learned to read, secondly how reading is learned and how it develops, and thirdly what happens when in cases like dyslexia, something goes wrong in the “learning to read” process. The reference to Proust in the title refers to passages from Proust’s writings in which he describes the pleasure of reading, the memories that are evoked by thinking back to special books from childhood (how Proustian!), and the “reading sanctuary”, that place of escape, a refuge from the world and its troubles. If Proust is a metaphor for a particular approach to reading, so the squid in the title refers to early neruo-scientific investigations of that creature which found how neurons fire and transmit to each other, adapting when things go wrong, repairing and compensating along the way. The squid analogy refers to the way reading required something new from existing structure of the brain, only possible because of the “plasticity” referred to earlier. Continue reading Review: Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf
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