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Good role models

Qian Julie Wang decided that she would become a lawyer. An avid reader, Wang explains, “I had come upon and gulped down condensed biographies of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Thurgood Marshall. Ruth and Thurgood showed me that lawyers didn’t have to be men, and they didn’t have to be white.” Wang, author of Beautiful Country, […]

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Good company

I am watched the movie Persuasion—based on the book by Jane Austen, of course. The movie was delightful, and I am going to read the book again. Jane Austen writes: “My idea of good company…is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.” […]

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Fake news?

‘”Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once said. The author Jonathan Swift was born in 1667. Amazing! Fake news has been around for a long time.

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My brain dried up?

It’s summer in Dallas. It’s hot. Maybe that’s why I’m a bit lethargic and my brain is a bit foggy. At least, my brain hasn’t dried up completely?! Cervantes writes about Don Quixote: “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” –Joy

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Candy corn, not vegetables

We all need to read more. Tracy Dahlby, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues, in an article in The Dallas Morning News, that this country needs a better literary infrastructure. In his article, Dahlby says that, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Americans invest 16 minutes a […]

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A little TV in your head

I remember when my daughter Mary Elizabeth read lots of Beverly Cleary books. I was sad when I heard that Cleary died recently, but I smiled when I read an obituary that mentioned a letter one girl wrote to the author. Reading, the girl wrote, is “like having a little television set in your head.” […]

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Read a poem

“To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June,” Sartre once said. And, it’s is lovely, too, to go for a walk in January. And, it is lovely, too, to read a poem in June.

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Enlarge your world

I just visited Washington, D.C., with Bob Woodward when I read Rage, and, before that trip, I visited the forests of California with Robert Powers when I read The Overstory. I am thankful for books during this pandemic! “There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all,” Jacqueline […]

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Summer reading

Summer is a wonderful time for reading a good book. Henry Stevens once said, “Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.” We found that quote in the Interabang Books online newsletter.

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We need silence

We live in “an oversaturated culture,” says David Ulin in his book The Lost Art of Reading—Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time. We “skitter across the surface.” We are “awash in distraction…What we need is silence.” And books! And time for reading.

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