Ephemerality

There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace, I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.

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Ann Patchett, Amazon’s Jungle Logic - NYTimes.com

This is an awesome article on Amazon, written by Richard Russo. Worth your time.

Maybe there is also that impulse inherent in a bookstore romance, that the love story itself will be codified and reproduced, printed and bound. Bookstores offer the hope that love, like any favorite novel, can be enjoyed over and over again, until one knows every sentence by heart.

—Finding love in bookstores: an eyewitness account. - By Emma Straub - Slate Magazine

Describing why a sentence is beautiful is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like.

—The Millions : The Great Gatsby Revisited

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

—Oscar Wilde (via kari-shma) (via hopefulvoice)

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

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The Economist via (via mudd up!) (via ericmortensen)(via jasencomstock) (via jaimeleigh)

This is true. And it’s double edged to the point where it’s the reason I haven’t read any of the Harry Potters (heard I’m missing out), the DaVinci Code (eh), and anything Twilight (ye gods). (via peterwknox)

It’s true, but occasionally I think there are books that can appeal to both sectors. Knox, and anyone else who is still holding out, the Harry Potter books are worthy of the hype.

Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and imagery and the long, convoluted sentences of a really meaty book — is a special sort of exercise that creates a new part of the brain that did not exist at birth.

“It’s semi-miraculous, really,” said Dr. Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. “We don’t have genes for reading. It’s an activity we invented, and by doing it, we show that our brain has the capacity to go beyond itself, to take all these circuits that were created for oral language or vision, and do something entirely different with them — deduction, critical analysis, imagination, contemplation.”

—Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy - The Endless First Chapter - NYTimes.com (via karigee)