That’s what Gates likes to read. But how about how he reads? How does Gates get the most out of his time spent reading? As he explains in the Quartz video above, it boils down to this:
Take Notes in the Margins: That simple step helps ensure that you’re really paying attention and engaging critically with the text. It lets you “take in new knowledge and attach it to knowledge you already have.”
Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish: Gates doesn’t explain why you should never cut your losses. Maybe it’s a form of self-discipline. Maybe it’s a fear of missing out on what a book promises to deliver. Or maybe it’s the sunk cost fallacy. Either way, Gates does recommend picking your books carefully before you get started.
Paper Books, Not eBooks: Better for marginalia, for sure.
Block Out an Hour of Reading Time: You can’t read a serious book in a short sitting. To really engage with a book, give it a good hour each day. A tall order, I known, in our age of ever-declining attention spans.
To be sure, you have your own reading practices to recommend. Please don’t hesitate to add them to the comments section below.
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What place does the paper book have in our increasingly all-digital present? While some utilitarian arguments once marshaled in its favor (“You can read them in the bathtub” and the like) have fallen into disuse, other, more aesthetically focused arguments have arisen: that a work in print, for example, can achieve a state of beauty as an object in and of itself, the way a file on a laptop, phone, or reader never can. In a sense, this case for the paper book in the 21st century comes back around to the case for the paper book from the 12th century and even earlier, the age of the illuminated manuscript.
Bookmakers back then had to concentrate on prestige products, given that they couldn’t make books in anything like the numbers even the humblest, most antiquated printing operation can run off today.
In the video above, the Getty Museum reveals the painstaking physical process behind the medieval illuminated manuscript: the sourcing, soaking, and stretching of animal skin for the parchment; the conversion of feathers into the quills and nuts into the ink with which scribes would write the text; the application of gold leaf and other colors by the illuminator as they drew in their designs; and the sewing of the binding before encasing the whole package tightly between clasped leather covers.
Some illuminated manuscripts also bear elaborate cover designs sculpted of precious metal, but even without those, these elaborate books — what with all the art and craft that went into them, not to mention all those pricey materials — came out even more valuable, at the time, than even the most coveted laptop, phone, reader, or other consumer electronic device today. Most of us in the developed world can now buy one of those, but the non-institutional patrons willing and able to commission the most splendid illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance included mostly “society’s rulers: emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops.”
To fully understand the making of the devices we use to read electronically today would require years and years of study, and so there’s something satisfying in the fact that we can grasp so much about the making of illuminated manuscripts with relative ease: see, for example, the two-minute Getty video just above, “The Structure of a Medieval Manuscript.” A fuller understanding of the nature of illuminated manuscripts, both in the sense of their construction and their place in society, makes for a fuller understanding of how rare the chance was to own beautiful books of their kind in their own time — and how much rarer the exact combination of skills needed to create that beauty.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Even if you don’t know eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese art, you definitely know the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai — specifically his Great Wave off Kanagawa. (And if you’d like to know a little more about it, have a look at this short video from PBS’ The Art Assignment.) But if that so often reproduced, imitated, and parodied 1830s woodblock print stands for Hokusai’s oeuvre, it also obscures it, for in his long life he created not just many other works of art but works that helped, and continue to help, others create art as well.
Hokusai’s bibliography, writes a Metafilter user by the name of Theodolite, includes “a little-known how-to book: 略画早指南, or Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawings, a manual in three parts. Volume I breaks every drawing down into simple geometric shapes; volume II decomposes them into fragmentary contours; and volume III neatly diagrams each stroke and the order in which they were drawn.”
Follow those links and you can read each of the books page-by-page, and not to worry if you don’t read Japanese; the artist renders his examples so clearly that the astute student can easily follow them.
Not that an understanding of Japanese wouldn’t enrich the reading experience: “Those are not all contours — they’re often characters,” notes another Mefite in the comments. “On page 4, there are drawings based on の, no, and the cranes start with ふ, fu. On page 9, the drawing of the man on the right is elaborated from み, mi. The hill on page 12 comes from 山, san, ‘mountain.’ The rocks on page 19 are from 石, ishi, ‘stone.’ ” These pages thus provide the especially astute student a way to learn Hokusai’s style of drawing and the elements of the written Japanese language at once.
In addition to the Quick Lessons books, adds Theodolite, Hokusai’s “other pedagogical works include his Drawing Methods,Quick Pictorial Dictionary, Dance Instruction Manual, and the lovely, three-color Pictures Drawn in One Stroke.” Considering the immense respect accorded to Hokusai today from all corners of the world — up to and including subtle tributes paid in major motion pictures — it surprises some to learn that he considered himself a “mere” commercial artist. But perhaps that very attitude endowed him with a relatively common touch, of the kind that enabled him to share his techniques with the reading public so openly, and so elegantly.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich —many of us have felt the influence, to the good or the ill of our own reading and writing, of Leo Tolstoy. But whose influence did Leo Tolstoy feel the most? As luck would have it, we can give you chapter and verse on this, since the novelist drew up just such a list in 1891, which would have put him at age 63.
A Russian publisher had asked 2,000 professors, scholars, artists, and men of letters, public figures, and other luminaries to name the books important to them, and Tolstoy responded with this list divided into five ages of man, with their actual degree of influence (“enormous,” “v. great,” or merely “great”) noted.
[Theodore] Parker. Discourse on religious subject — Great
[Frederick William] Robertson’s sermons — Great
Feuerbach (I forget the title; work on Christianity) [“The Essence of Christianity”] — Great
Pascal’s Pensées — Enormous
Epictetus — Enormous
Confucius and Mencius — V. great
On the Buddha. Well-known Frenchman (I forget) [“Lalita Vistara”] — Enormous
Lao-Tzu. Julien [S. Julien, French translator] — Enormous
The writer at the Valley Advocate, a Tolstoy aficionado, came across the list by sheer happenstance. “On my way to work, I found something just for me in a box of cast-off books on a sidewalk,” they write: a biography of Tolstoy with “something cooler inside”: a “yellowed and fragile New York Times Book Review clipping” from 1978 containing the full list as Tolstoy wrote it. “Gold,” in other words, “for this wannabe Tolstoy scholar.” If you, too count yourself among the ranks of wannabe Tolstoy scholars — or indeed credentialed Tolstoy scholars — you’ll no doubt find more than a few intriguing selections here. And if you simply admire Tolstoy, well, get to reading: learn not how to make the same things your idols made, I often say, but to think how they thought. Not that any of us have time to write War and Peace these days anyway, though with luck, we do still have time to read it — along withThe Thousand and One Nights, David Copperfield, The Odyssey, and so on. Many of these works you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
Note: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in July, 2014.
Art saves lives, and so does author Judy Blume. While some of her novels are intended for adult readers, and others for the elementary school set, her best known books are the ones that speak to the experience of being a teenage girl.
For many of us coming of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Blume was our best—sometimes only—source when it came to sex, menstruation, masturbation, and other topics too taboo to discuss. She answered the questions we were too shy to ask. Her characters’ interior monologues mirrored our own.
While her stories are not autobiographical, her compassion is born of experience.
Here she is on Are You There, God?It’s Me, Margaret, a tattered paperback copy of which made the rounds of my 6th grade class, like the precious contraband it was:
When I was in sixth grade, I longed to develop physically like my classmates. I tried doing exercises, resorted to stuffing my bra, and lied about getting my period. And like Margaret, I had a very personal relationship with God that had little to do with organized religion. God was my friend and confidant. But Margaret’s family is very different from mine, and her story grew from my imagination.
…in the early seventies I lived in suburban New Jersey with my husband and two children, who were both in elementary school. I could see their concern and fear each time a family in our neighborhood divorced. What do you say to your friends when you find out their parents are splitting up? If it could happen to them, could it happen to us?
At the time, my own marriage was in trouble but I wasn’t ready or able to admit it to myself, let alone anyone else. In the hope that it would get better I dedicated this book to my husband. But a few years later, we, too, divorced. It was hard on all of us, more painful than I could have imagined, but somehow we muddled through and it wasn’t the end of any of our worlds, though on some days it might have felt like it.
My daughter Randy asked for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die. She had read several novels about teenagers in love. If they had sex the girl was always punished—an unplanned pregnancy, a hasty trip to a relative in another state, a grisly abortion (illegal in the U.S. until the 1970’s), sometimes even death. Lies. Secrets. At least one life ruined. Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual. Neither took responsibility for their actions. I wanted to present another kind of story—one in which two seniors in high school fall in love, decide together to have sex, and act responsibly.
The heartfelt lyrics of Amanda Palmer’s recent paean to Blume, who turned 80 this week, confirm that the singer-songwriter was among the legions of young girls for whom this author made a difference.
In her essay, “Why Judy Blume Matters,” Palmer recalls coming up with a list of influences to satisfy the sort of question a rising indie musician is frequently asked in interviews. It was a “carefully curated” assortment of rock and roll pedigree and obscurities, and she later realized, almost exclusively male.
This song, which name checks so many beloved characters, is a passionate attempt to correct this oversight:
Perhaps the biggest compliment you could give a writer ― or a writer of youth fiction ― is that they’re so indelible they vanish into memory, the way a dream slips away upon waking because it’s so deeply knitted into the fabric of your subconscious. The experiences of her teenage characters ― Deenie, Davey, Tony, Jill, Margaret ― are so thoroughly enmeshed with my own memories that the line between fact and fiction is deliciously thin. My memories of these characters, though I’d prefer to call them “people” ― of Deenie getting felt up in the dark locker room during the school dance; of Davey listlessly making and stirring a cup of tea that she has no intention of drinking; of Jill watching Linda, the fat girl in her class, being tormented by giggling bullies ― are all as vivid, if not more so, as my own memories…
Palmer’s husband, Neil Gaiman, puts in a cameo in the video’s final moments as one of many readers immersed in Blume’s oeuvre.
Readers, did a special book cover from your adolescence put in an appearance?
For more on Judy Blume’s approach to character and story, consider signing up for her $90 online Master Class.
If you’ve read much Joan Didion, you’ve almost surely come across an observation or phrase that has changed the way you look at California, the media, or the culture of the late 20th century — or indeed, changed your life. But if life-changing writers have all had their own lives changed by the writers before them, which writers made Joan Didion the Joan Didion whose writing still exerts an influence today? Conveniently enough, the author of Play It as It Lays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album once drew up a list of the books that changed her life, and it surfaced on Instagram a few years ago:
In 1978, when Didion had already become a new-journalism icon, The Paris Review’s Linda Kuehl asked her whether any writer influenced her more than others. “I always say Hemingway,” she replied, “because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time.” TeachingA Farewell to Arms, her number-one most influential book, she “fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”
Didion’s list also includes other masters of the sentence, albeit most of them possessed of sensibilities quite distinct from Hemingway’s. Henry James, for instance: “He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them.” Consider them alongside the other writers among her favored nineteen, from novelists like Emily Brontë and Joyce Carol Oates to poets like Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden to figures with one foot in literature and the other in journalism like George Orwell and Norman Mailer, and you’ve got a mix that no two aspiring writers could read and come out sounding exactly alike. No surprise that such a set of influences would produce a writer like Didion, so often imitated but, in her niche, never equaled.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Today the word “alchemy” seems used primarily to label a variety of crackpot pursuits, with their bogus premises and impossible promises. To the extent that alchemists long strove to turn lead miraculously into gold, that sounds like a fair enough charge, but the field of alchemy as a whole, whose history runs from Hellenistic Egypt to the 18th century (with a revival in the 19th), chalked up a few lasting, reality-based accomplishments as well. Take, for instance, medieval illuminated manuscripts: without alchemy, they wouldn’t have the vivid and varied color palettes that continue to enrich our own vision of that era.
Alchemists “explored how materials interacted and transformed,” and “discovering paint colors was a practical outcome.” The colors they developed included “mosaic gold,” a fusion of tin and sulfur; verdigris, “made by exposing copper to fumes of vinegar, wine, or even urine”; and vermillion, a mixture of sulfur and mercury that made a brilliant red “associated with chemical change and with alchemy itself.”
The very nature of books, specifically the fact that they spend most of the time closed, has performed a degree of inadvertent preservation of illuminated manuscripts, keeping their alchemical colors relatively bold and deep. (Although, as the Getty video notes, some pigments such as verdigris have a tendency to eat through the paper — one somehow wants to blame the urine.) Still, that hardly means that preservationists have nothing to do where illuminated manuscripts are concerned: keeping the windows they provide onto the histories of art, the book, and humanity clear takes work, some of it based on an ever-improving understanding of alchemy. Lead may never turn into gold, but these centuries-old illuminated manuscripts may survive centuries into the future, a fact that seems not entirely un-miraculous itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates wrote this:
For years, I’ve been saying Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was the best book I’d read in a decade. If I could recommend just one book for anyone to pick up, that was it. Pinker uses meticulous research to argue that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I’d never seen such a clear explanation of progress.
I’m going to stop talking up Better Angels so much, because Pinker has managed to top himself. His new book, Enlightenment Now, is even better.
Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids.
Although the book won’t get officially released until February 13th, Pinker’sEnlightenment Nowis already one of the 20 bestselling books on Amazon–no doubt partly thanks to Bill Gates. If you’re looking to get disabused of the widely-shared belief that the world is moving in the wrong direction, you might want to pick up your own copy. (Soon, you could also download it as a free audiobook through Audible.com’s free trial program.)
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