“Weekend Reading” is an ongoing series, in which we write about what has captured our attention lately on and outside the web.
Looking for something to read this weekend? We’ve scoured the web (and our bookshelves) for thought-provoking articles, books and the occasional podcast. Enjoy!
Cover image via Amazon.com
Jessica has been reading Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire. She writes “I’ve long admired Radway’s other work on why women read romance novels and on girls’ zine culture, but had managed to overlook the work that occupied her for over a decade in the middle of her career. In A Feeling for Books, Radway examines the history of the Book-of-the-Month Club, an organization that has shipped a monthly selection of books to subscribers since the 1920s. She describes the intensive labor of the judges who select which books will be offered each month and the long reports they write while making their decisions. The judges’ reports detail their emotional responses to the books and they ultimately evaluate the books based on the quality of their reading experience, on what they felt as they read and how completely they were absorbed by their reading. A long-time reader of popular and even pulp fiction – currently, my pleasure reading is Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s – I’m fascinated by the idea of evaluating the experience of the book, rather than the book itself.”
Capria loves this piece on a French city’s investment in short story vending machines. In her words, “I thought this was not only a cool idea (stories from a vending machine!), but also a great reminder of the power of a short story. Since we are constantly distracted, taking a few minutes out of the day to read can be both fun and meaningful. We have used short stories in Books@Work programs, as well as in our own monthly team discussion sessions to great effect. Taking on something short allows us to feel like we are able to accomplish a goal and gets us back into the practice of reading and reflecting.”
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons
And as for me, I found myself taken with Will Self’s description of walking the Thames in the footsteps of the Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys. Self writes that
“what the diaries give us is, quite simply: Pepys, coalescing out of a flux of fugitive thoughts and impressions – a human being like us in many emotional respects, prey to the same lusts, insecurities and morbidities; yet with his head full of nothing at all we would recognize – a sensorium utterly alien to early 21st century, and preoccupations of an ineffable otherness.”
We think a lot about literature’s ability to bridge difference and expose commonalities – and this is, of course, one reason I read. But I also love that reading can expose me to worlds I never otherwise would have seen. Self appreciates this quality in Pepys’s world – its “ineffable otherness” – and his essay is an interesting experiment in the past rubbing up against and speaking to the present. He writes that,
“as I progress along the south bank, passing the site of Redriff Steps, where Pepys often made landfall before proceeding on foot, I am struck most forcibly by how little of what I’m seeing he would have seen.”
I guess I’ll be revisiting the diaries this weekend, too.
Elsewhere on the Internet:
While we’re on the subject of Pepys’s diary, this project lets you get his entries by email.
Did you hear? Classic modernist novels contain fractals, according to researchers at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics.
On the bookshelf as an object – part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.
Why we like straightforward stories – and complicated ones.
The key ingredient in creative success? Persistence.
The Kellogg School of Management has a podcast on what executives are learning from the fine arts – a reminder that the best learning comes from a wide range of experience.
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with French Novels, 1887, The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Perth [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Further Reading
Real Magic: Sharing Good Books
How Books@Work is Bringing the Humanities to the Front Line
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