Tag Archives: reading
Illustration Love: Reading
RT vidamelife
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Caffeinated Links: Books and You, Everything You Need to Know about Guardians of the Galaxy
Gorgeous, gorgeous piece from ThoughtCatalog on the love of reading. “When others are drawn to selfishness and cruelty, and everything seems bathed in shades of vapid grays, I hope you grab for a book. Find the color, find the light, and remember what it means to be right, what it means to be real, what it means to be you.” RT
io9 has absolutely everything you need to know about the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer (and by extension, film). RT
Hitfix’s Alan Sepinwall reviews NBC’s ‘About A Boy’ and calls it a watered-down take on on the Hornby book and film RT
And NPR’s Linda Holmes turns in her usual nuanced, thoughtful review and comes to the same conclusion as Sepinwall. “The least helpful thing you can do with an adaptation of a book (or film) made by intelligent, capable people is to sniff, “Not as good as the original.” After all, when a property is as adored as About A Boy, it can take a while for anything else to feel quite as good, and presumptive skepticism is a regrettably simple opening gambit. But what’s problematic in this adaptation is not that the TV show has not brought along the quality of the book and film, but that it has not brought along the qualities of the book and film.” RT
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Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”: A Love Story
This is so so insanely good. It’s the book you want to send off immediately to your ex you still have feelings for, and your current crush, and also the book you put down periodically because you have to stop and laugh, really laugh, out loud, for longer than a minute. Sharp and funny and so brilliantly on-point with its stream-of-consciousness interior monologue about how we (human beings in general, and specifically men I suppose) think about relationships and romance and sex and the opposite sex. Not what we think when it’s daylight and your life is going well and you’re at work or talking to friends and you’re the calm stable adult, but what you think in the wild and crazy and trivial domestic moments and all the awkward mundanity and flashes of pure glory of being in a real relationship, and the adrenaline and loss of connection and magic of starting a new one.
Read it. It is hyper-articulate about love and pop culture, and hyper-aware about the peculiar quirks and stupidity and strengths of the male gender in particular.
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Quotidian
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Insert Russian Emotion into Repressed British Lit
The Millions’ Year in Reading, one of the my favorite events in the online world, has begun! Sample this hilarious bit from a Gary Shteyngart review –
“I always had difficulty with the relative lack of emotion in English lit. I developed several strategies to make my reading easier. First, I would insert some hot Russian emotion into the chilly scenes by hand. So if a character is carrying on some abstruse conversation about standing for parliament or whatever, I would interrupt it in my mind with: “And then Casaubon Casaubonovich threw himself around her neck and cried violently.” Problem solved. Then I decided to Yiddishize some of the writing to make it more haimish. Take for example the first line of David Copperstein: “Whether I shall turn out to be the mensch of my own life, or whether that station will be held by some other putz, this spiel must show.” RT
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Pop Culture Love Letter
This almost brought tears to my eyes. Philip Graham at The Millions on reading with his son – “Maybe those days of curling up in bed with a story were long gone, but what if we read the same book together silently, side by side, in the living room? If I bought two copies of a novel, we could take on chapter-length chunks each evening and then discuss what we’d just read. Perhaps in this way I could gently lead my son to an appreciation of the deeper internal landscapes that literature offers…The pace of the plot kept us constantly engaged” RT
You go girl. Finally someone speaks the truth. Fit mom Maria Kang on the firestorm of criticism about her photo – “What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s Yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head. I didn’t create them. You created them. So if you want to continue ‘hating’ this image, get used to hating many other things for the rest of your life. You can either blame, complain or obtain a new level of thought by challenging the negative words that come out of your own brain.” RT
Benedict Cumberbatch, who wins ALL THE THINGS, does an amazing Chewbacca Impression. My favorite, though? Harrison Ford’s face. RT
Illuminating post on the clothes behind the fall’s best comedy. “Mindy’s personal style is a lot more edgy, and Mindy on the show is more of a urban hipster. So there are outfits that Mindy Lahiri wears on the show that Mindy Kaling wouldn’t, but I’ve definitely seen Mindy changing it up — she’ll find out where I bought something and get one for herself and add it to her wardrobe. I think that Mindy’s personal style has grown with access to the clothes she has on the show. Much like Sarah Jessica Parker, she was never the fashion plate before “Sex and the City” that she is now.” RT
According to Lifehacker, standing for 3 hours a day works miracles – the equivalent of running 10 marathons a year RT
The SF Chronicle has created a gorgeous Bay Area Literary Map RT
Coffee and Irony 