I talk about reading slowly, but why does it matter? You can watch YouTube summaries, purchase cliff notes, and conspire with ChatGPT to say that you’ve “read the novel.” In high school, we were assigned Hemingway’s beautiful book, The Old Man and the Sea. Most of the students cheated and rented the movie. I’m workingContinue reading It’s Not Enough to Possess a Good Mind
When you stop to think about it, Shakespeare really was a genius. In Richard III, we find one of literature’s most famous lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent” (Folger Shakespeare Library). Richard, who eventually becomes King Richard III, speaks this poetic and memorable phrase. Before we look at why this line is soContinue reading Now is The Winter of Our Discontent
How do you read more books? The answer isn’t a speed reading course or playing Audible at 2X the speed – you have to invest more time in reading. Everyone’s hunting for the secret formula to consuming large quantities of books, but what they’re not willing to do is spend four to five hours aContinue reading Reading Takes Time
The great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), summarized the mantra of our reading community when he said, “We must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes” (Becker 199). The mantraContinue reading Madness and Brutes
At 9:00 a.m., the Mayor for our little town blew the foghorn and a mass of children ran onto baseball fields to collect thousands of Easter eggs dumped in the grass. I thought it would take quite a while to pick them up, but those kids swarmed the field and stripped it clean in lessContinue reading The Swarm of Children