We asked 11 writers to tell us about a book that opens up space for adults and children to discuss important questions.
reading
We read, forget, and are formed anyway.
I read a book of poems straight through without stopping. I couldn't help it.
When Jane Tompkins couldn’t move, she read
Confined by illness, the feminist literary scholar dove into the complete works of V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.
Good reading and the good life
Reading books is a virtuous act.
A tall stack of books on the floor of my bedroom greets me each morning. Its very presence is exhausting.
One pastor in New Orleans would end every examination by asking, “What is your favorite work of fiction?” The other ministers collectively groaned. But I applauded the question. To be in South Louisiana meant being in a land of stories. As this NYT article observed, South Louisiana is “a place that produces writers the way that France produces cheese—prodigiously, and with world-class excellence.”
Recently my wife and I moved, and the time came to decide which books I could live without. I dreaded it.
My student hasn’t allegorized Jane Eyre as Origen did the Bible. But she wrestles with passages until the text gives her a blessing.
The Century asked Thomas G. Long, Barbara Brown Taylor, Scott Cairns and Kathleen Norris to describe their daily routines with the written word.
Reading fiction has done more to baptize my imagination, inform my faith and strengthen my courage than any prayer technique has.
How our minds have changed
Computers are changing the way we think. "Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better." This is probably not a good thing, says Nicholas Carr.
When I am blessed with a little more leisure time than usual, I like to spend some of it with poetry.