How To Be Well Read

Download or read book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read written by Pierre Bayard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book How to be Well Read written by John Sutherland and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer '500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction.' The Times ___________________________________________________________ Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written. He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid £20 for Black Beauty? It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative, bite-sized pieces. Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate. __________________________________________________ 'Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.' Mail on Sunday 'A dazzling array of genres, periods, styles and tastes... chatty, insightful, unprejudiced (but not uncritical) and wise.' Times Literary Supplement

Download or read book How to Read a Book written by Mortimer J. Adler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the art of reading by examining each aspect of reading, problems encountered, and tells how to combat them.

Download or read book Well-Read Lives written by Barbara Sicherman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a compelling approach structured as theme and variations, Barbara Sicherman offers insightful profiles of a number of accomplished women born in America's Gilded Age who lost--and found--themselves in books, and worked out a new life purpose around them. Some women, like Edith and Alice Hamilton, M. Carey Thomas, and Jane Addams, grew up in households filled with books, while less privileged women found alternative routes to expressive literacy. Jewish immigrants Hilda Satt Polacheck, Rose Cohen, and Mary Antin acquired new identities in the English-language books they found in settlement houses and libraries, while African Americans like Ida B. Wells relied mainly on institutions of their own creation, even as they sought to develop a literature of their own. It is Sicherman's masterful contribution to show that however the skill of reading was acquired, under the right circumstances, adolescent reading was truly transformative in constructing female identity, stirring imaginations, and fostering ambition. With Little Women's Jo March often serving as a youthful model of independence, girls and young women created communities of learning, imagination, and emotional connection around literary activities in ways that helped them imagine, and later attain, public identities. Reading themselves into quest plots and into male as well as female roles, these young women went on to create an unparalleled record of achievement as intellectuals, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman's graceful study reveals the centrality of the era's culture of reading and sheds new light on these women's Progressive-Era careers.

Download or read book The Little Guide to Your Well-read Life written by Steve Leveen and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Leveen draws on his own quest for a well-read life to offer book lovers a variety of successful and time-tested strategies for finding time to read and getting more from written materials.

Download or read book A Wallflower Christmas written by Lisa Kleypas and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's Christmastime in London and Rafe Bowman has arrived from America for his arranged meeting with the very proper Natalie Blandford. But when four former Wallflowers try their hands at matchmaking, no one knows what will happen. Martin's Press.

Download or read book How to Become Ridiculously Well-read in One Evening written by E. O. Parrott and published by Penguin (Non-Classics). This book was released on 1987-01-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 150 succinct and entertaining encapsulations of the best-known books in the English language, including a few foreign works familiar to us in translation.