What Your Reading Rules Reveal About Your Personality
“I can’t specify what exactly prompted the urge to purge. I think it was a combination of spring cleaning momentum, getting tired of dusting all these cheap Target book shelves, getting tired of constantly trying to teach my toddlers not to rip covers off my paperbacks, plain old fashioned running out of room, and…(gasp) reading more and more books from the library on my ereader.
So, I girded my loins and began pulling out every single book that I had no plans to re-read, and every book in my TBR pile that had been there longer than two years.”
— The Great Book Purge of 2013
Those are books in the containers! This community library in France makes it almost like books grow on trees.
Girls, not boys, in all three countries received more time from parents on three activities: reading, storytelling, and teaching letters and numbers.
Maybe boys aren’t as interested, and so the interest isn’t reinforced? Too squirrelly to keep still? Huh.
____________________________
Ebook besteller lists will now appear only online, not in print. The reasoning behind this is a bit more tenuous, given the documented overlap between print and digital readers. Heavy readers, the kind likely to bother even glancing at bestseller lists, are reading in both formats. The real thought steering this might be that the digital bestsellers are so driven by pricing whims—99 cent ebooks feature heavily—that they have little bearing on literary culture outside of those lists.
What a strange decision.
____________________________
Looking to transform Hollywood’s pile of unproduced scripts into publishable e-books, James West, a motion-picture industry entrepreneur, has launched Script Lit. The company licenses optioned, but never produced, scripts, to turn them into commercial fiction.
Fascinating idea. Some of the best storytellers in the world are working in film, but only a very small percentage of their work gets produced (and often for reasons totally separate from the quality of the story). Turning those stories into good books, though…..not that easy.
____________________________
Australia’s Qantas Airlines is promoting the announcement of its extended flight routes by commissioning a series of books that last exactly as long as each flight.
You know if Infinite Jest is waiting there on your seat for ya, you’ve got a ways to go.
And then there was the time iTunes featured our podcast in the “New and Noteworthy” section on its homepage. Listen to the latest episode here.
“Stopping was death. Stopping meant you’d given up and turned the keys of the world over to other people. The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
“I hope you have a book like this, a book that makes you feel sane when other forces conspire to loosen your bearings, a book that values what you value, a book that makes you laugh and nod and gives you comfort. If you think that books don’t have the power to confer validation upon their readers, then I’m afraid we’ve had very different experiences. Because although of course validation comes from a dozen other places in my life, books have their own way of reaching those hard to scratch places right in the middle of my soul (sometimes when I don’t even know that there’s a place in need of a scratch) in a way few other things can. They are intensely personal in this way, these books, and one that speaks to me with power and clarity might sound tinny and distant to you. This exclusivity is one of the reasons they’re so powerful: it sometimes feels as though they were written with us in mind.” — When a Book Gets Everything Right
[video]
The Well-Readheads' Summer Reading Forecast -
What’s on tap for you this summer?
Win a set of 14 Virginia Woolf books in this START HERE giveaway!