#on reading

[bookaddict24-7]

"I like that library books have secret lives. All those hands that have held them. All those eyes that have read them."

―Same Sun Here by Neela Vaswani

[patolemus]

It’s very humbling when you’re reading a book —part of a trilogy, very acclaimed— and the only thing you can think of is ‘the fanfic I read the other day was better’

[uglygreenjacket]

*reads child a bedtime story*: I wonder when and why I stopped needing one of these.

*pulls up ao3 in bed like I’ve done every night for years*: Oh. OH.

[faeriefully]

What’s that specific type of book if you answered the second option?

My friend and I are having a discussion.

[feral-ballad]

Sayat Nova, from Anthology of Armenian Poetry, ed. & tr. by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian; "Listen to me"

[kitchen-light]

Nothing I write could do him justice or communicate how great of a teacher, friend, poet, and activist he was. He was very strong and very stubborn. I always believed that people like him never die . . .they somehow transcend death and pain and come back to us as a source of hope, strength, and belief. In a way, we already see how far-reaching his words are now. His poem “If I Must Die” has being translated into more than two hundred and fifty languages, and his verses are chanted at protests all around the world. As we navigate the waves of sorrow at losing him, it is important for us to remember that he was targeted because of his words and his message and that it is our duty to carry it and amplify it. After all, he told us: “If I must die,/ You must live,/ to tell my story.”

Nadya Siyam, from "Remembering Dr. Refaat Alareer", published in Words Without Borders, January 29, 2024.

[chthonic-cassandra]

The relief of opening a book, reading the first few lines, and seeing that the prose is good.

[derangedrhythms]

She feels the lure of sitting with a good book, a big thick one of the kind that leave an impression stronger and realer than life itself.

Hanne Ørstavik, Love, tr. Martin Aitken

[somerabbitholes]

— index cards, moyra davey

[bookaddict24-7]

“She read paperbacks too, one after the next like she was chain-smoking—romance, science fiction, old pulp fantasy. All she wanted to do was sit, unbothered in a circle of lamplight, and live someone else’s life.”

―Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

[onenakedfarmer]

ITALO CALVINO If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

[deadpoetsmusings]

Joan Didion, The White Album

[glitterblossom]

looking for a new eldritch horror story

ask my friends if their faves are interesting or just tentacles

they dont understand

pull out illustrated diagram explaing what is interesting and what is tentacles

they laugh and say “it’s a good story maam”

spend hours of my life reading it

its tentacles

[antigonick]

But in the end, I think it’s perhaps best for [my characters] to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction [...]. That is not necessarily bad�� but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

—Stephen King, in his "Preface" to The Stand

[catmint1]

Among the most poignant scenes in contemporary literature, ever pertinent today, is Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four cradling his paper diary out of view of the panopticon of his telescreen and privately writing down his opinions. Except the telescreen isn’t all-seeing, it’s downright primitive compared to contemporary surveillance capitalism, where Big Brother doesn’t eavesdrop but Alexa does. By contrast, printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive. There is a safety to books, where Smith is able to enter the private realm of literature simply by sitting a bit off camera. That’s a freedom which, I fear, will become increasingly rare.

—Ed Simon, "In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse" Literary Hub, 25 November 2024