Tag: Reading

Bookmarked I Do Not Have Enough Ideas by Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

Having, producing, evolving, and connecting good ideas together takes work. It takes practice. It takes momentum. It takes reading books. No, not just online. Books have a different frame rate, and fiction and nonfiction each have variations of this. Sure, read blogs, but they aren’t the same as losing yourself in a book. Sure, read that book on exactly the topic that interests you by that person who looks just like you, but it won’t be the same as reading a book that is way out of your comfort zone by someone who looks nothing like you.

Source: I Do Not Have Enough Ideas by Kin Lane

Talking about having enough ideas, Kin Lane talks about reading books that take you out of your comfort zone. This feels like an extension of Amy Burvall’s “In order to connect dots, one must first have the dots”.

Read https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/how-to-talk-about-books-you-havent-read-9781596917149/

In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of “non-reading”-from books that you’ve never heard of to books that you’ve read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

With How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard explains how we are always already talking about books we have not read because we cannot ever actually read them. I wrote a longer response here.

ᔥ  Austin Kleon — How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre… ()

Continue reading “📚 How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Pierre Bayard)”

Bookmarked You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.

Source: You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen

In a short post, Jim Nielsen reflects upon the purpose of reading, that being to expand your thinking. This thinking was in part inspired by Dave Rupert’s discussion of ideas over facts and how we check these.

The goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.

Source: How do you verify that? by Dave Rupert

This reminds me of something Amy Burvall once suggested:

“in order to connect dots, one must first have the dots”

Source: #rawthought: On Ditching the (Dangerous) Dichotomy Between Content Knowledge and Creativity by Amy Burvall)

The challenge that both Nielsen and Rupert touch on is that we are not always conscious or critical of the ideas (or dots) as we consume them, even so they make us who we are:

I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.

Source: You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen

This is based on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

For me, the notion of unconscious ideas harks back to something J. Hillis Miller once said about the ethics of reading:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

Source: ‘The Obligation to Write’ by J. Hillis Miller

Liked https://blog.ayjay.org/accountability/ (blog.ayjay.org)

You can assign reading to students; but if you don’t develop strategies for holding them accountable, then it doesn’t really matter what you assign. They’re Self-Deceived Rational Utility Maximizers after all, and if there’s one thing you can never change about them it’s that. 

https://blog.ayjay.org/accountability/

Replied to My Reading Practices for Book Club Selections by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

As part of my reading process, particularly for book club related reading, I’ve lately settled on what seems to be a particularly productive method of reading for my needs.

Thank for sharing your process for reading as a part of a book club Chris.

Your first step of flicking through some reviews and the contents reminded me of a piece from The Marginalian about Bill Cosby’s strategies for reading faster, in which he talks about previewing first:

Previewing is especially useful for getting a general idea of heavy reading like long magazine or newspaper articles, business reports, and nonfiction books.

Source: How to Read Faster: Bill Cosby’s Three Proven Strategies by Maria Popova

I am interested in your us of audiobooks. I must admit, I have really turned to audiobooks as I felt I was never going to get quality reading time to sit quietly with a book. Just wondering, when listening, do you have to be giving your whole attention, or do you listen while doing other things? For example, I have heard Cory Doctorow explain how he ‘reads’ while swimming. Personally, I like listening in my lunch breaks while pounding the city streets, but I often wonder if there is something lost in doing two things at once, especially if I have a thought and want to make a note. Really, that is my biggest challenge, actually doing something with what I read.

Bookmarked How to Read Faster: Bill Cosby’s Three Proven Strategies by Maria PopovaMaria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“Nobody gets something for nothing in the reading game.”

Bill Cosby may be best-known as the beloved personality behind his eponymous TV show, but he earned his doctorate in education and has been involved in several projects teaching the essential techniques of effective reading, including a PBS series on reading skills. In an essay unambiguously titled “How to Read Faster,” published in the same wonderful 1985 anthology How to Use the Power of the Printed Word (UK; public library) that gave us Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 timeless rules of writing, Cosby offers his three proven strategies for reading faster.

Bill Cosby provides an interesting set of strategies associated with reading:

  1. Preview — If It’s Long and Hard
  2. Skim — If It’s Short and Simple
  3. Cluster — to Increase Speed AND Comprehension
Bookmarked General Questions to Use in Book Clubs or Lit Circles by Pernille Ripp (pernillesripp.com)

Book clubs or literacy circles are some of my most favorite explorations to do with kids. Making space for deep discussions, led by the students, and framed by an inquiry question is something that I love to be a part of. That’s why we have done book clubs twice a year for the past many years. I would not do more than that, kids also want to have experiences where they are not forced to read a certain book with peers, even if they have a lot of embedded choice. And as always, when in doubt, ask your students how often they would like to do them, make space for their ideas and allow for personalization and ownership.

Pernille Ripp provides an extensive list of questions to support book clubs / literature circles.
Bookmarked Why Learn to Read? (daily.jstor.org)

The value placed on literacy has changed over time, shifting from a nineteenth-century moral imperative to a twentieth-century production necessity.

Deborah Brandt explains that learning to read has meant many things over time.

“Literacy was irrevocably transformed from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative,” Brandt concludes, “Transformed from an attribute of a ‘good’ individual into an individual ‘good.’”

This reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s work on digital literacies and how what this means can vary.

Liked Ibram X. Kendi on His New Book and Why Kids Today Need the Kinds of Books Being Banned by Zan Romanoff (Reader's Digest)

These diverse stories don’t just help us better understand ourselves, though. They also help us understand and empathize with people of different backgrounds.

“It is a huge loss for people to not be able to find themselves in books, particularly if they’re a person of color, if they’re queer, if they’re women or trans,” Kendi says. “And it’s a huge loss for people who are not trans and people who are not queer and who are not people of color. It’s a loss because they’re not able to learn about others.”

Replied to https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/listen-up/ (daily-ink.davidtruss.com)
I am with you David. I too have turned to listening, rather than ‘reading’. For me, this stretches beyond audiobooks. I often listen to articles via Pocket or use accessibility tools to listen to eBooks. The strangest thing is whether I call it ‘reading’ or ‘listening’?
Bookmarked Who should read aloud in class? (The Confident Teacher)

Professor Diane Lapp, from San Diego State University, in the categorically titled, ‘If you want students to read widely and well – Eliminate ‘Round-robin reading’, suggests the following approaches:

  1. Repeated reading, which involves repeating a reading modelled first by the teacher or another proficient reader.
  2. Choral reading, which means reading together with others who are proficient readers.
  3. Echo reading, or the student echoing or repeating what the proficient reader has just read.
  4. Readers’ Theatre involves a dramatic reading of a text or script by the students.
  5. Neurological impress, which involves the student and teacher reading together while tracking words.
Alex Quigley questions the practice of popcorn reading and instead focus on more fluent reading strategies.
Bookmarked 5 strategies for reading complex texts (The Confident Teacher)

Any time a pupil is reading a complex text, it will likely prove difficult, effortful, and even frustrating. We cannot just expect to offer pupils harder and harder texts and expect them to become better readers either. However, by explicitly teaching pupils to be strategic and to cohere their knowledge and understanding, we can offer them the right tools to tackle the job of reading complex texts.

Rather than simply relying on simpler texts, Alex Quigley discusses some strategies for supporting students with grappling with more difficult texts. This includes:

  • Sharing the secret that struggling is actually normal
  • Generate curiosity by getting students to engage with texts through student questions and predictions
  • Activate prior knowledge to help make connections
  • Identify and teach keystone vocabulary
  • Read related texts

Associated with all this, one of the biggest challenges with reading comprehension is addressing the question why read any text at all? For example, should everyone be made to read Finnigan’s Wake?

Replied to Read Fiction (Daily-Ink by David Truss)

Usually I only ‘let myself’ read fiction on holiday breaks. But I’ve been drawn a lot more to fiction in the last couple years. It started a couple Christmas breaks ago when I received some free ebooks from Audible and I listened to a science fiction novel and got hooked into an epic series. Then I listened to a couple books that I never would have selected for myself, just because they were free… and I loved them. But reading fiction outside the holidays always came with a little self-imposed guilt.

David, your discussion of fiction reminded me of an interview between Stan Grant and Dan Haesler where at the end of the conversation they talk about the power of reading, thinking and questioning when it comes to leadership. This is about going beyond one’s own world view and challenging your perceptions. I think that fiction is a powerful way of doing this.

As Ursula K. Le Guin touches on in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

Two pieces of fiction that have left me wondering lately have been Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both capture a world from many different perspectives vastly different from my own.

Replied to #tdc3632 #ds106 #ds106 What are you reading? (The DS106 Daily Create)

“Books” flickr photo by Vicente RG shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Tell and/or show us what you’re currently reading. Maybe tell us why as well? Tweet your response t…

Inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson, Damian Cowell and BBC In Our Times podcast, I am currently meandering my way through Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. #tdc3632 #ds106
Liked If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading? (Austin Kleon)

It is my opinion that if a book’s contents can be adequately “summed up,” so that you really don’t miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.

Replied to Your phone is not a book – David Preston (David Preston)

To paraphrase Professor Faber from Fahrenheit 451, is it the book itself or what’s in the book that we admire? Would the history and the philosophical ideas in the book come through if it were presented in a different medium? Would the digital version be the same or different? I devoured Clive’s article and reflected on how his first-person account brought these issues to life.

Reflecting on Clive Thompson’s article about reading a book on a phone, David Preston turns his attention to the differences between phones and books. He explores some of the affordances associated with phones (and their data) and celebretes the opportunity to connect and share.

Our world works better when people connect in systems and contribute value by sharing personally relevant ideas. Even when we disagree – especially when we disagree – communicating with each other forms bonds that lead to deeper understanding and more value. We are way beyond “keep your eyes on your own paper.” We face complicated problems that require collaboration and community to solve. Schools must adapt and prepare young people to thrive in an interdependent, interdisciplinary, interconnected world.

I am left thinking about the idea of ‘sharing as caring‘:

Maybe it is just me. Maybe sharing online just works? However, I agree with The Luddbrarian that where we need to start in regards to Facebook and social media in general is ‘expand our imagination’ in this area. I think that this starts by asking questions. What does it mean to be digital? How are we really caring in online space? Does it have to involve sharing? As always, comments welcome.

Bookmarked Reading “War and Peace” On My Iphone – Clive Thompson – Medium by Clive Thompson (Medium)

These days, my reading has bifurcated. Contemporary books, I mostly read in print. This is partly because I still like paper books a lot, but also because I want my local bookstore to survive, so I tend to email them whenever there’s a new book out; they order it in usually within 48 hours, making them essentially as fast as Amazon Prime. But for anything that’s old, classic, or from antiquity, it’s all on my phone. In addition to Tolstoy, I’ve used it to read Middlemarch (crazy-packed with wit), Moby-Dick (in which, because I’m a nerd, I found myself enjoying the whale-physiology stuff even more than Ahab’s black-metal scenes), Crime and Punishment (yikes yikes yikes), and about a third of Proust’s seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past (which I stopped because, alas, I concluded that I didn’t like Proust very much. War and Peace swept me away, but Proust never stopped being a grind. “Seriousness of purpose” only takes me so far. Apologies to all the Proust fanatics out there; don’t hate me.). At any rate, I’m slowly filling the holes in my knowledge of the big novels. If I had a Kindle meter for my life, it would probably show I’m — what, maybe 11% of along the path of the historic novels I hope to read?

Clive Thompson reflects upon the experience of reading War and Peace on his phone. He discusses the access to free text, taking notes using voice-to-text, ability to dip in and out, and access to the web to follow various lines of thought.

I once tried reading Middlemarch on my phone, but was not necessarily a fan. I do however like listening to books on my phone, whether audio recordings or via text-to-voice. This then allows me to take notes within the digital text.

What I am interested in is the cleanest workflow. This includes the applications I use to read/listen to various texts and the means of extracting my notes in a meaningful way. For example, I recently came upon a means of downloading my Kindle Notes.

Replied to Our Reading Conferring Sheet by Pernille Ripp (pernillesripp.com)

While this conferring sheet is only a small sliver of the work that happens all year as they explore and develop their reading identity further, it serves as a conversational touchpoint that reminds us of the goals we have, the work we need to do, and who we are as human beings in our classroom. While some kids are eager to share their journey as readers, others are much more hesitant or fully unwilling and I respect that as well. After all, they don’t know me yet so they have no reason to trust me. We then take the time needed to develop our relationship and continually invite them into this conversation. It takes patience and dedication but every child is worth it.

Pernille, I really like the simplicity of the structure of your conferring sheet. Do you use anything like the CAFE menu to guide the goal setting or do you just work with the student where they are at?
Bookmarked Victor Brombert: “On Rereading” (The Yale Review)

Rereading is subject to fortuitous circumstances, and remains a strictly personal affair. But the act of rereading, especially of books that have had a transformative effect, illustrates a wider common experience: the continuous shuttle, or to-­and-­fro movement, between art forms and lived life. It is a creative weaving, a process by which we are ceaselessly shaped. This to-­and-­fro motion between artifact and so-­called reality takes various forms. It can occur between a given novel and specific urban setting, or between an admired painting and a geographic region. One might see the San Frediano district of Florence through a previous encounter with Vasco Pratolini’s fiction, discover Petersburg through exposure to Gogol and Dostoyevsky, or grow fond of the Umbrian countryside through earlier views of the delicate trees in the background landscapes of Perugino’s compositions.

Victor Brombert reflects upon rereading texts during the pandemic and the strange experience of discovering a past self written in the margins. With this, he reflects upon the different forms of rereading:

voluntary rereading, the result of a willful decision to revisit a book one has admired, or a book that has left one with some unanswered questions.

…

subconscious rereadings, those that occur without the specific act of reading, much as the memory of a tune can haunt the mind without its actually being heard again.

…

quite precious experience that might be called “pre-­reading,” when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.

Whatever the form, each of these acts of rereading changes us as readers.

Books can transform us. They can determine a mental landscape, remake our vision of things in much the way the advent of impressionism made people see both cityscape and landscape afresh.

This reminds me of J. Hillis Miller’s President’s Column in his book Theory Now and Then, in which he talks about the joy of reading and the subsequent obligation to write:

Miller argued that we have an obligation to write. He suggested that reading and teaching are completed by writing, that it is a core element to our transaction with language. As he stated:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

To me, Miller’s writing refers to an action where we make meaning out of the text, where we gain a subjective mastery over what it is we are reading. This may not always be a physical act and often doesn’t even reach the page. The challenge as I see it is to follow through with these commentaries. That is why blogging is so powerful.

Liked But What Happens to Our Readers – On the Unintended Impacts Computerized Reading Programs Can Have on the Development of Readers by Pernille Ripp (pernillesripp.com)

If we look at the research that surrounds reading enjoyment and motivation, we see a direct correlation between the effects of reading intervention programs and how kids feel about themselves as readers.  They can do so much good but they can also do a lot of damage.  Richard Allington and others remind us of the incredible impact the reading curriculum decisions have on our most vulnerable readers.  That “the design of reading lessons differs for good and poor readers in that poor readers get more work on skills in isolation, whereas good readers get assigned more reading activity.” That our most vulnerable readers are “often placed into computer programs or taught by paras rather than placed in front of reading specialists. That their experience is fundamentally shaped around their perceived gaps rather than their full person. So how does that play out year after year when a child is not placed in front of a trained and caring reading specialist but instead of a computer that cares nothing about their reading identity or how hard they are working? How will it play out when kids only see their reading value in the points they get, the levels they pass, and the scores they receive? Not books read, not experiences created, not background knowledge developed, or small accomplishments celebrated.