readers

Quick Links: 10 Things I Know About You and Your Books

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Jenny Hansen knows 10 things about you, and I have to admit she pretty much nailed me.  After reading Tolkien as a child, I spent many a day searching for Ents in the forest behind my house. Head on over to Writers In The Storm and see how many items fit you.

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10 Things I Know About You and Your Books

By Jenny Hansen

From our earliest moments, most writers are avid readers. We devour books – for story, for Craft, for new worlds and new ideas.

We have To Be Read piles (TBR for short) that are taller than small children. Our favorite authors and characters become our friends.

I don’t know if we become students of the written word because we love to read or if we read because we were born to love the written word. All that chicken and egg Zen is well beyond me.

I just flat out love books and every writer I know does too. You might even describe us as “obsessed with the printed word.” It takes a lot of love to go through what we must do to yank our stories from our hearts onto the page.

If you are a writer, there are things that I know about you and your books:

1. I know you get uncomfortable when you are “bookless.”
If you are stuck somewhere without a book, you will begin reading any words available – shampoo bottles, food labels, billboard signs. Whatever. Books and magazines are preferred, but in a pinch, any words will smooth your soul. (Do you keep a bag of books in your car trunk like I do?)

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

A reader’s manifesto

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Please read the full post on TheBookSeller website.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

The Weird Agonies And Little-Known Science Of Wordnesia

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This article by Matthew J.X. Malady originally appeared on Slate on 3/4/15.

One hour and seven minutes into the decidedly hit-or-miss 1996 comedy Black Sheep, the wiseass sidekick character played by David Spade finds himself at an unusually pronounced loss for words. While riding in a car driven by Chris Farley’s character, he glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. “Robes? Rouges? Rudes?” Nothing seems right. Even when informed by Farley that the word he’s looking for is roads, Spade’s character continues to struggle: “Rowds. Row-ads.” By this point, he’s become transfixed. “That’s a total weird word,” he says, “isn’t it?”

Now, it’s perhaps necessary to mention that, in the context of the film, Spade’s character is high off nitrous oxide that has leaked from the car’s engine boosters. But never mind that. Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities. These wordnesias sneak up on us at odd times when we’re writing or reading text.

Here’s how they work: Every now and again, for no good or apparent reason, you peer at a standard, uncomplicated word in a section of text and, well, go all row-ads on it. If you’re typing, that means inexplicably blanking on how to spell something easy like cake or design. The reading version of wordnesia occurs when a common, correctly spelled word either seems as though it can’t possibly be spelled correctly, or like it’s some bizarre combination of letters you’ve never before seen—a grouping that, in some cases, you can’t even imagine being the proper way to compose the relevant term.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

Is Reading a Right or a Privilege?

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 1/27/15.

After almost a year of protests by free speech advocates and famous authors, the UK’s Ministry of Justice is going to give prisoners the right to receive books in parcels from family, starting in February. Perhaps the most curious aspect of this case is not that books, among other items that a family member might send via packages as personal property, were banned, but that this case saw lawyers demanding that law be more nuanced with regard to determining whether books are rights or privileges.

Obviously (perhaps more obviously to those of us who have inhaled two seasons of Orange Is The New Black) prisons restrict what is allowed on their premises to prevent the smuggling of drugs and other paraphilia—and it must be noted that the public library system in British prisons was never in danger of being removed. But this case still feels like a victory for free speech and art in one society’s most limited venues.

And it makes me wonder about our prison system in the United States. I did a tiny bit of research and found out that in Florida, inmates often are restricted to having only four books in their possession, and those books must come directly from a publisher or mail distributor—if a family member attempts to send a book via a package service (like UPS) it will be rejected, just as books were restricted in the UK before the amendment to prison policy.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

More Verbal Abuse Among Young “50 Shades” Readers

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This post by Andy Henion – Michigan State originally appeared on Futurity on 8/22/14.

Young women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are more likely than others to show signs of eating disorders and have a verbally abusive partner, a new study suggests.

Further, those who read all three books in the Fifty Shades erotic romance series are at increased risk of engaging in binge drinking and having multiple sex partners.

All are known risks associated with being in an abusive relationship, much like the lead character, Anastasia, is in Fifty Shades, says Amy Bonomi, the study’s lead investigator. And while the study did not distinguish whether women experienced the health behaviors before or after reading the books, it’s a potential problem either way, she says.

“If women experienced adverse health behaviors such as disordered eating first, reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma,” says Bonomi, chairperson and professor in Michigan State University’s department of human development and family studies.

“Likewise, if they read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviors seen in our study, it’s possible the books influenced the onset of these behaviors.”

 

Depictions of violence

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a link to the source study, on Futurity.

 

Literary Hangovers: Share Your Rude Awakenings From Fictional Reveries

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This post by Alison Flood originally appeared on the Guardian Books Blog on 7/15/14.

After a heavy bout of reading – or a bout of heavy reading – the return to reality can be painful. Tell us about your worst mornings after the book before.

There are certain books I’ve finished and, looking up, have found the world to be a gloomier place for having done so. I was reminded, thanks to the novelist Harriet Evans on Twitter last week, of how The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden had exactly this effect on me. Her story of that “hot French August, [when] we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages” – when the Grey children, left alone in a small French hotel while their mother is ill, fall into danger – exerted such a powerful grip on me that I read it desperately, obsessively, and felt slightly ill when I emerged.

I am indebted, then, to the team at Epic Reads for dubbing this feeling the “book hangover”, in a neat, funny little video. That’s exactly what it is. The experience was good; the aftermath, not so much.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Guardian Books Blog.

 

Here Be Digital Dragons: Lucid Writing Requires Mental Maps

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This post by Douglas Carlson originally appeared on Brevity on 1/18/14.

That slight tremor on August 15, 2013—which passed without much notice in the rest of the world—was the earth shifting at The Georgia Review. On that day we began accepting electronic submissions. On August 18th an essay came in online that caught my eye. But after I read it a couple times, I found myself making a few lukewarm notes in preparation for moving it along to the next reader: “strong start, good closing, fuzzy in the middle—an ambitious essay that lost its focus.” For some reason that I don’t recall now, I decided to print the essay out and give it another try. You know where this is going: I immediately understood what the author was up to and loved the piece. It has been accepted for publication, and the whole incident has given me pause to realize that I don’t think that I read as well—that is, with the same level of perception—from a screen as I do from paper. Nothing against my iPad, which I dearly love, or even the big old Dell on my desk, but when I read at my job I’m evaluating the efforts of working writers, most of whom care and grind and hope. I owe them the courtesy of my complete attention and comprehension.

 

Click here to read the full post on Brevity.

 

7 Things the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages Tell Us About American Readers

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This post by Jospeh Stromberg originally appeared on Vox on 5/30/14.

Conventionally, the most common way of gauging the most popular books in America has been looking at the New York Times’ bestsellers list.

But as we shift from reading on paper to screens, there’s an interesting new option: Amazon’s lists of the most-highlighted passages and most-highlighted books on Kindles around the world.

When you read on a Kindle, you can highlight passages, the same way you might highlight text in a physical book. The passages you highlight are all collected in one place, accessible either on the reader or a computer.

But Amazon also collects data on what its readers highlight most. The resulting most-highlighted lists are a fascinating record of reading as a whole.

There are some limitations to the data: it’s only for people who read on Kindles, and use them for highlighting. The data is extremely heavily skewed towards American readers (Amazon isn’t saying whether they include international data, but it looks like they don’t). And some books don’t lend themselves to highlighting quite as much, which is why many of even Amazon’s bestsellers don’t appear on the lists.

But it’s also true that some books get bought and end up on bestseller lists, but aren’t actually read — whereas these lists are a terrific record of what we might nowadays call reader engagement. They reveal not just what books are read, but what part of books are read — and even tell us a little about what people are thinking about as they do their highlighting.

Here are seven things the lists tell us about Americans reading today.

 

Click here to read the full post on Vox.

 

Jane Austen Read Her Reviews… and Kept Notes on Them

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This post by Sal Robinson originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 5/22/14.

Some authors refuse to read their reviews. And then there’s Jane Austen. Who not only, it turns out, listened to what her friends and acquaintances had to say about her books, both positive and negative, but also took notes on it.

Austen’s notes are part of a cache of 1,200 documents that the British Library have drawn out of their Victorian and Romantic collections and are now highlighting on their website with all kinds of supplementary bells and whistles—contextualizing essays, documentary films, and images of primary sources ranging from manuscripts to illustrations to advertisements, broadsides, and the occasional dancing manual.

Austen appears to have compiled the reactions of her readers from letters, hearsay, and direct conversations and recorded them on a set of closely written pages around 1815, before her death at the age of 41, two years later.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Read, Kids, Read

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This editorial by Frank Bruni originally appeared on The New York Times site on 5/12/14.

As an uncle I’m inconsistent about too many things.

Birthdays, for example. My nephew Mark had one on Sunday, and I didn’t remember — and send a text — until 10 p.m., by which point he was asleep.

School productions, too. I saw my niece Bella in “Seussical: The Musical” but missed “The Wiz.” She played Toto, a feat of trans-species transmogrification that not even Meryl, with all of her accents, has pulled off.

But about books, I’m steady. Relentless. I’m incessantly asking my nephews and nieces what they’re reading and why they’re not reading more. I’m reliably hurling novels at them, and also at friends’ kids. I may well be responsible for 10 percent of all sales of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a teenage love story to be released as a movie next month. Never have I spent money with fewer regrets, because I believe in reading — not just in its power to transport but in its power to transform.

So I was crestfallen on Monday, when a new report by Common Sense Media came out. It showed that 30 years ago, only 8 percent of 13-year-olds and 9 percent of 17-year-olds said that they “hardly ever” or never read for pleasure. Today, 22 percent of 13-year-olds and 27 percent of 17-year-olds say that. Fewer than 20 percent of 17-year-olds now read for pleasure “almost every day.” Back in 1984, 31 percent did. What a marked and depressing change.

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The New York Times.

 

Thank Goodness For The Fairer Sex

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This post by Michael W. Sherer originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/23/14.

There are hundreds of reasons I love women, but one of the most important is how much smarter they are than men. (Unfortunately, too many women don’t give themselves credit for it, and more unfortunately most men will never admit it.) I believe one of the reasons they’re smarter is because they read more than men do.

The statistics are out for 2013, and once again women surpassed men in the number of books they read. According to Pew Research, 76 percent of all adult Americans (18 and over) read at least one book last year. But that breaks down to about 69 percent of men and 82 percent of women.

Not only are more women reading than men, they also read at greater rates than men do. The average number of books read by all adults last year was 12, and the median number was five (meaning half of all adults read more than five and half read less). Both numbers are higher if you include only adults who read at least one book—a mean of 16 books and a median of 7. But here again, women outpaced men by a substantial margin. Women read an average of 14 books, compared to 10 for men.
– See more at: http://crimefictioncollective.blogspot.com/2014/04/thank-goodness-for-fairer-sex.html#sthash.WQM33fDw.dpuf

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes some informative charts, on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

Reading to Have Read

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This post by Ian Bogost originally appeared on The Atlantic on 3/14/13.

Spritz doesn’t strive to fix speed reading’s flaws, but to transcend reading entirely.

If you’re a person who reads, you may have read about Spritz, a startup that hopes to “reimagine” reading. Like most tech startups, reimagining entails making more efficient. Spritz promises to speed up reading by flashing individual words in a fixed position on a digital display. Readers can alter the speed of presentation, ratcheting it up to 600 words per minute (about three times the speed the average reader scans traditional text).

This method, called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), isn’t new, but Spritz has added an “Optimal Recognition Point” or ORP to this display technique. They claim it helps readers recognize each word most effectively by focusing their attention on a red letter representing its optimal point of recognition. Public response to the technology has been tremendous. According to Spritz, over 10,000 developers have already signed up to develop “Spritzified” products.

Does Spritz work? Well, it depends on what you mean by “work.” As Olga Khazan wrote here at The Atlantic, speed reading has long been accused of sacrificing comprehension for convenience. University of South Carolina cognitive psychologist John M. Henderson further explains that Spritz’s ORP doesn’t improve matters:

 

Click here to read the full article on The Atlantic.

 

Does Reading Actually Change The Brain?

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This article, by Carol Clark-Emory, originally appeared on Futurity.org on 12/23/13.

After reading a novel, actual changes linger in the brain, at least for a few days, report researchers.

Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, appear in the journal Brain Connectivity.

“Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and the director of Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy. “We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it.”

Neurobiological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to identify brain networks associated with reading stories. Most previous studies have focused on the cognitive processes involved in short stories, while subjects are actually reading them as they are in the fMRI scanner.

The study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative. Twenty-one Emory undergraduates participated in the experiment, which was conducted over 19 consecutive days.

All of the study subjects read the same novel, Pompeii, a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris that is based on the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Italy.

“The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” Berns says. “He tries to get back to Pompeii in time to save the woman he loves. Meanwhile, the volcano continues to bubble and nobody in the city recognizes the signs.”

The researchers chose the book due to its page-turning plot. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way,” Berns says. “It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”

 

Click here to read the rest of the article on Futurity.org.

Click here to view the original Emory University study.

 

Creating A Discussion Guide For Your Book

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This post, by Lisa Lickel, originally appeared on the AuthorCulture site on 12/9/13.

Love em, Hate em, want them in the back of the book or not—discussion questions do add a new dimension to your work.

I’ve had publishers tell me they don’t want them in the book, and know of some publishers that require questions. I’ve put them in one of my books, and have designed them for several of my books as well as for other books in my book club when I’ve been the discussion leader.

Why questions? Questions are good for personal reader reflection, but especially for a group discussion guide. I think that questions in the back of the book make your work look serious. Readers can skip them if they want. A discussion guide may mean inclusion in book clubs. Why do I want book clubs to read my book? First of all, these questions give me a place to do some explaining that I can’t inside the text; it also gives me an opportunity to point out my subtle genius points that may have been, sadly, overlooked. Think of it like watching the TV show Lost with JJ’s subtexts. Secondly, sales, library sales and borrows, word of mouth, my friends. Possible author face time. Feedback. Book clubs are always looking for fodder, and while it’s annoyingly true they tend to choose NYT bestsellers, there’s no reason to think yours can’t make a list or two.

The larger publishers like Random House often have author pages with all kinds of goodies-author interviews and background for the books, and discussion questions. Read some of them for some pointers.

ReadingGroupGuides website is one of the top ones to go to for great discussion questions, but they’ve gone from a $100 to $20 fee to have your material placed there. However, if you can get in on other readers’ group blogs, and especially GoodReads, an Internet search will bring up your name and book. I’ve placed questions on GoodReads for my books. Don’t forget to put them on your own site, Amazon and BN author pages and forums.

How to devise your questions for either fiction or non?

Foremost, never make them yes or no questions, or lead to obvious answers. If the questions are in the book, you can refer to page number, such as, “On page 142 Cala Lily has a breakthrough. What is it and how did it affect her feelings toward Reed?” However, it’s best not to be that specific due to readers having different versions.

How many questions should you write?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on AuthorCulture.

 

Providing Rich Reading For Time Poor Readers

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This post, by Martyn Daniels, originally appeared on the Brave New World blog on 10/23/13.

How do we get people reading again or introduce them to reading?

We have to accept that reading is different in that it stimulates thinking and imagery that is often served up on a plate with other media. After all, you don’t have to imagine what someone looks like when they are stood as large as life in front of you on a screen.

We have seen many charity and government-backed initiatives and ones driven by the industry itself but the bottom line is that at best they are treading water and at worst losing the battle. We may all cheer from the battlements when books are donated and given away free to folk but if this is not succeeding we have to ask whether the focus and process is correct and what we have to do to really engage and make a difference.

The YouTube age is impacting not just the young but the older generations. We are becoming more and more visual and increasingly time poor. Giving someone a book is not addressing the problem and merely compounding it. We have to create the thirst and feed the habit not just give someone War and Peace and expect a convert. The studies don’t lie. The latest from the National Literacy Trust study of 34,910 young people, claimed nearly a third of children between eight and 16 say they read no text-based media at all in their daily leisure time and that the number of children who read outside school has fallen by 25% since 2005.

Many thought that children’s reading was migrating from print to digital, but in reality their consumption of information is moving away from reading or writing text. Their attitude to reading have also become more negative over time. This was reflected in 21.5% of young people agreeing with the statement, “I would be embarrassed if my friends saw me read,” up from 16.6% on the 2010 study.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Brave New World blog.