Speed of reading

Yesterday my brother asked me how I can read so many books.  He asked if I read every word, heard every word in my head, or did I speed read.  The answer to the first two questions is yes, no to the third.

The only appeal of speed reading is that I would be able to read more books.  But speed reading involves skipping words, getting a general gist of what's being said and that does not appeal to me at all.  When I read, I read every word so that I become even more enveloped in the world within the book.  Particularly when reading fiction, reading every word allows me to visualize the scenes depicted in the book.  Skipping words would be too distracting to me; instead of getting lost inside the book, I would feel more like an outsider, an observer.  I know this because I have done some speed reading: when I am no longer interested in the book and just want to know how it ends.  Thankfully, this doesn't happen often.

Another reason I can read so many books is because I read so often.  I have been reading as much as I can for as long as I can remember.  I make reading a priority in my day.  While others have television, Facebook, online games, gardening, sports, and other hobbies, my hobby is reading.  This gives me a minimum of five hours a day (depending on my schedule) for reading.  Just like other things, the more you do it, the better and faster you get.

And I've just started reading "Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read" by Stanislas Dehaene.  So I told my brother I'd let him know what I learned from it, since the index has quite a few references to the speed of reading.

On a side note, at Easter my mother gave me an envelope with all of my report cards in it (Junior Kindergarten to my last year of high school).  Yesterday, I read them.  One of the most interesting things I saw was on my Junior Kindergarten report card.  My family was posted to CFB Lahr in Germany, which is where I attended JK.  On the report card under "Reading and Writing Skills" are two criteria I have never seen on a report card before or since: (1) Shows a respect for books and (2) Explores books with interest.  Oh, how I wish those two criteria were on every report card forever!  I think those two things should be mightily encouraged in today's society.  Just because people spend more time online now than they ever have doesn't mean that books have lost their usefulness or power.  I think a respect for books is highly critical in humanity in general.  And I will do my best to promote that in others.

Read on,
Paula

Organizing my personal library

Because I have spent so much time in libraries, I have never given any conscious thought to how I organize my home library.  I just automatically organize it the way we do at work: fiction is sorted by author's name (last name then first name), except I then alphabetize by title for each author; non-fiction is sorted by the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.  I know a lot of people don't understand how the DDC works but, in the simplest of terms, each subject has its own number.  Therefore, in even simpler terms, non-fiction is sorted by subject.  I then alphabetize by author within the subject.  To me, this seems the easiest way to organize any library.  Reading "Phantoms on the Bookshelves" by Jacques Bonnet (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds), he talks about how difficult it is to organize large personal libraries (his definition of 'large' being a collection of more than 1000 books), his own included.  Although my library is not large (almost 300), I can still imagine how easily I would be able to navigate my collection if I did have thousands of books.  This is because I easily navigate two such large collections every day at work.  Even if I don't know the exact DDC number for a specific title, I do know the general area it should be found and then I browse that area until I find what I'm looking for.

This is so much easier than Bonnet's arrangement by genre and sub-genre, with books being placed alphabetically within sections.  He has three main categories: literature; non-fiction; and the arts.  Literature is subdivided into languages.  Non-fiction has two main divisions: abstract (philosophy, theology, history of religions, science, psychology, literary criticism, linguistics, and literary history) and concrete (history, politics, anthropology, and biography).  The arts are subdivided by music, cinema, photography, painting and drawing, architecture, exhibition catalogues and art history that are then subdivided again.  His arrangement doesn't even work for him all the time:

"Sometimes I spend time looking for a book for which the logical place has been overtaken by events.  Or failing to find a book that I know I have somewhere.  Have I mis-shelved it or is it lost?  I cannot always answer that question, or else it is answered too late, when I have already bought another copy."

I know that I take my knowledge of DDC for granted.  I also know that I don't know it as well as I could; I still have to look things up.  Being responsible for cataloguing the collections of two different public libraries means that I've gotten a stronger sense of where specific topics are shelved.  And then I have my own collection which reflects my personal interests and subjects.  I know that my knowledge of DDC has been gained over almost ten years of working in public libraries.  I also know that library patrons generally have a vague idea of how DDC works.  I truly wish that all students were taught how to use DDC in elementary school and made to use it in all levels of education (elementary, secondary, and college/university) so that everyone in every generation could take DDC classification for granted like I do.

Read on,
Paula

Judging a book by its cover

Lately I'm finding that the titles that I am the most eager to read are the ones I think have the most appealing cover art.

(In the photo)
*The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
*The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
*The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
*The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
*The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
*Grayson by Lynne Cox

In general, we are taught not to judge a book by its cover.  And I fully believe that to be true, particularly when the cover includes people.  I try to ignore any cover art that attempts to represent the main character(s) because, almost always, the publisher fails to accurately capture my mental image of him/her/them based on the actual book content.  To me, the book content-to-cover art dilemma is a static version of the book-to-movie dilemma.  I think it is quite nearly impossible to visually adapt book content simply because the brain interprets book content far more dimensionally (aka through all of the senses) than is possible through one medium (vision).  Having watched the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Time Traveler's Wife movies and being disappointed with their adaptations, I have no interest in ever seeing the movie versions of my favourite books.  Even if they ever made the Corinna Chapman series into movies, I wouldn't watch them because I much prefer my mental images.

But I still love cover art in general.  I have seen cover art that I think is truly beautiful on a book that I have no interest in reading.  Cover art truly is an art...and, just like general art, some of it is better than the rest.

Read on,
Paula

Discovering publishers catalogues...dangerous!

Our library receives piles of publishers catalogues that the CEO goes through to choose titles for me to order.  Until recently, I thought nothing of it.  And then I wondered if the public can have access to these catalogues.  So I went online and realized how few publishers/imprints I know.  I went to Penguin's Canadian website and found access to their catalogues.  This was a bad idea...I now have 115 catalogues downloaded to my computer to peruse at my leisure.  And that's after not downloading the ones for children's books and audiobooks.  There are some imprints I'd never heard of.  Like Dutton/Gotham.  I thought it sounded like they would sell mysteries, thrillers, etc.  Yeah, so I opened one of their catalogues and have now downloaded them all because of "Every Day is an Atheist Holiday" by Penn Jilette and "The World's Strongest Librarian" by Josh Hanagarne.  And there are still a few other imprints I wasn't sure if I would like and will check out their catalogues later.  But here's the problem: this is one "publisher" and I've got 128 catalogues to browse through (2002-2013).  As I find more publishers, I will probably be downloading/viewing their catalogues.  I do believe that my love of books has officially become an obsession.  I think my TBR is about to become burdensome.  Up until now, my TBR has been achievable because, if I read nothing but what is on my list, I could feasibly read them all in less than 10 years.  Now that I've discovered publishers catalogues, I'm finally in danger of never getting them all read.  It doesn't help that I heard that 50,000+ titles are published every year.  And I never hear about most of them.  Even with my picky tastes, that's a lot of books.

But then, the hunt for books to add to my TBR has been one of my favourite things about reading.

This just happens to come at a time when I am actually craving buying books.  This is the first time that it's been an actual craving rather than a desire.  What makes this particularly painful right now is my need to save money.  So perhaps if I gave myself permission to buy one book a month, I wouldn't end up overspending when I finally do go book buying.

Read on,

Paula