"Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming, and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads about it—often by skipping a great deal of material and absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience, sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are reading settles in and makes its full impact."
A Country Without Libraries by Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
#libraries
#books
#internet
Books I Read In October
#books read
#lists
#robertson davies
#maile chapman
#andré aciman
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies
Lyrical, absorbing and intellectually satisfying. I look forward to reading the rest of the Deptford trilogy.
Your Presence Is Requested At Suvanto
Maile Chapman
I enjoyed the writing but the relentless bright whiteness of the north got to me and I gave up reading half way through. I’d pick it up again sometime.
Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman
Very disappointing after Out Of Egypt. The half of the book that I got through was entirely taken up with the narrator’s obsessive adolescent yearnings and somehow lacked the verve and beauty of his other book.
By Edward Bawden
(Source: wordsandeggs, via 50watts)
Edward Lear, More nonsense, pictures, rhymes, botany, etc., 1872, via archive.org
(Source: theshipthatflew)
"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."
JG Ballard
#jg ballard
#boredom
#future
