Activity tagged "books"

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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
– The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Don’t hurt anyone. Never bully people weaker than yourself. Help out those in need. Some would say that these rules are obvious. But the truth is, the obvious is no longer obvious in today’s world. What’s worse is that some people even ask why. They don't understand why they shouldn't hurt other people. It's not a simple thing to explain. It’s not logical. But if they read books they will understand. It’s far more important than using logic to explain something. Human beings don’t live alone, and a book is a way to show them that.”

Rintaro did his best to explain to the invisible listener.

“I think the power of books is that—that they teach us to care about others. It’s a power that gives people courage and also supports them in turn.”

Rintaro broke off for a moment, biting his lip.

“Because you seem to have forgotten,” he resumed with all the strength he could muster, “I’m going to say it as loud as I can. Empathy—that's the power of books.”
– Sōsuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books
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“School board member admits to banning books without reading them, faces lawsuit”.
Ellsworth Toohey in Boing Boing. Published .
"I don't like them. I wouldn't read them. I'll be honest I've read the reviews on some of them…" With these words at a public meeting, Tennessee's Rutherford County School Board member Stan Vaught admitted to banning books he hadn't read — a revelation that kicked off a federal lawsuit. According to the complaint, board members relied primarily on BookLooks.org, a website connected to the Hitler-quoting group Moms for Liberty, instead of reading the books themselves or considering their literary merit. The board repeatedly overruled their own librarians' recommendations to keep books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and Ernest Cline' Ready Player One because it has "characters discussing beliefs that heaven and god are not real."
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“Novelist Katie Kitamura: 'As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it's never been clearer that writing matters'”.
Sophie McBain in The Guardian. Published .
More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.
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East of Eden, and book rating scales

Every so often I read a book that's so good it makes me feel like I need to recalibrate my book ratings scale. How can it be a "five star" book when it's so much better than other "five star" books I've read?

But I've always found the ubiquitous star rating scales poorly suited to my mental model of cataloguing books, which vary so widely they could never be boiled down to a plain numeric scale. Do the stars represent how much I enjoyed a book? The depth of feelings it made me feel? The quality of the prose? The ease with which I find myself turning to the next page?

I've deeply enjoyed many a book with terrible writing and clichéd plots; is that a five star book? How do I rate a book with beautiful prose and intricate plotlines, that nonetheless causes me to dread picking it back up?

And what is a "one star" book? If a book is truly unenjoyable, I likely won't finish it at all — and thus won't rate it, as it feels unfair to cast judgment on a book I've only partially read. Is "one star" a book I liked enough to finish, but just barely?

Anyway, this is all to say you should read East of Eden, which topped the charts in just about every category, whether it was the prose, enjoyment, or deepness of feelings I felt afterwards.