Posts tagged lit

“Does the act of reading, at a glance, feel in any way communal? Or does it feel, in fact, quite the opposite? Even members of the most ambitious and tightly-knit book clubs tend to do their actual reading in solitude. … Nevertheless, as you read, your fellow adventurers are out there waiting to meet you, biding their time behind a chance encounter, a well-fated introduction, a tweet, or a blog post, or an otherwise interesting article of prose. You didn’t realize it, but so much mystery, so much anticipation has amassed behind your new friendship, a cosmos-load of potential energy. You didn’t know it — you were too engaged with the mind behind the words — but through all the sentences, the pages, the lovely, lonely hours past, a part of you secretly longed for a flesh-and-blood friend with whom you could share your experience. When you meet your friend, you’ve met an instant confidant. You unburden yourselves on one another, reliving the adventures, revisiting those daunting and glorious experiences you dearly miss, refining and refreshing your perspective in the silver gazing pool of another soul, one that’s triumphed through similar loneliness. Book-bonding is soul-mating, pre-arranged through art.”

—Bryan Basamanowicz, in “From the Library of your Soul-Mate: The Unique Social Bond of Literature,” for The Millions

“My co-worker noticed that I had some downtime at work, and suggested that I start my own tumblr using literary quotes. I really liked the idea, but then I realized that a quote from literature can be so much more appealing if it has a photo of Joan Holloway attached to it. So that’s how the idea of Slaughterhouse 90210  was born. (Rejected blog titles: Full House of Mirth, Catch-227).

“As the blog evolved over the years, my main goal became getting books back into pop culture discussions right alongside Mad Men and Jersey Shore. In my own little way I wanted to propagate the notion that books are still a vital part of the way we live now.”

—Maris Kreizman, to Bullett Magazine, on the inspiration for her Slaughterhouse 90210

“Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain? Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks that countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

-Pierre Bayard’s in “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read,” pg 6.