A "Reading Dog" Offers A Comforting Paw(Images Courtesy Of Librarydogs.) Library cats have garnered nationwide media coverage recently, including here on Book Patrol. Not wishing to offend canine loving readers, today's post gives library dogs equal time. Libraries across the country from Swampscott, MA. to San Jose, CA. are making exceptions to that arcane "No Dogs Allowed " rule for a program proven to help struggling young readers."I need a little help with my reading, because I'm sometimes a slow reader," said Linda , a 9-year-old New York City girl. She found the perfect tutor at New York Public Library....
A Reading-Slut’s Confession: I Slept With 12,775 Books!
According to a new biography never to be published, over the course of fifty-two years of reading in bed (since age 6), I've slept with 12,775 books. Fifty-two years = 245.7 books a year = a book every day and a half. I keep my optometrist on retainer.I did so shamelessly, with little regard for the books as individuals. When I get an itch, I reach for a bitch of a book. 'Might as well face it, I’m addicted to livre.I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t remember many names; their title-pages are a complete blank.As a kid, I went...
2009’s Most Amazing Story About Reading Books
Kim Peek, the savant who was the inspiration for Barry Levinson’s original screenplay and film, Rain Man, died last week at age fifty-eight.The New York Times obit limns the many extraordinary abilities and skills this man possessed.Of those, none is more head-snapping than the astonishing skill that allowed him to simultaneously read facing pages of a book— one with each eye. He ultimately read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.This, despite the fact that, as the Times noted, Mr. Peek “was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination...
Five Simple Ways To Increase Your Reading Speed
With so many professional and personal reading responsibilities and desires it’s a wonder that any of us ever get through the pile of reading material we have to or wish to read.Evelyn Woods Speed Reading techniques don’t work for me; I’m not much for scanning text with a finger or any other body part. But I still have to read an enormous amount of material each week.What to do?1. Listen to appropriately tempo’d music while reading. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is, and how effective it can be. I once read War and Peace likity-split while Flight of...
Winslow Homer and the Women of “The New Novel”
The New Novel. Watercolor, 1877.In 1877, Winslow Homer exhibited his watercolor, The New Novel, at an exhibition of the American Watercolor Society.It is an image that below its surface of innocent, leisurely repose churns a contemporary cultural scene fraught with change and fear; the culture-war in the U.S. had begun.“...Avoid also all those miserable sensational...novels and illustrated papers which are so profusely scattered around on every side. The demand which exists for such garbage speaks badly for the moral sense and intellectual training of those who read them...The extent to which the press is used in the publication of romance...