Posts Tagged ‘reading’

Blog overload

Posted April 23, 2012 by
in Editorial, Planning Tips | 5 comments »

A couple years ago, I tried and failed to bat back the tangled mess my RSS reader had become. (Categories helped me prioritize, and I cut some subscriptions, like BoingBoing, that I knew I could never keep up with… but I’ve still got more than a thousand unread posts.)

Social media mavens say that people are relying more on their friends (through Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and less on personal subscriptions to keep up with Internet content. That isn’t quite true in my case — I’m on Facebook, but I’m not very active, and I gravitate first to sites like the New York Times and Slate, which I’ve had bookmarked for years — though I often find great blogs and articles through Quo Vadis’s own social media presence. Still, I’d be curious to learn more about other people’s habits. What’s your preferred mode of navigation and/or discovery? Has it changed over the past few years?

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Articles and optimism

Posted March 21, 2012 by
in Editorial | 1 comment »

One of the main characters of Norman Rush’s Mating, Nelson Denoon, keeps a stack of old Economists at home, certain that he’ll one day get to them. I thought of that when I shared an Economist article about personal metrics, because it’s from an issue dated early March and I only just got around to reading it.

For me, saving magazines is more of a problem with The New Yorker than it is with The Economist (which I can justify tossing if it’s not current and the news I want to catch up on has seen too many subsequent developments). I used to think the iPad would fix this — no need to waste space on paper copies if I’ve got everything electronic form! Trouble is, I’m less likely to return to old issues if I can’t see them cluttering up the table, and I’m less likely to remember which pieces I meant to read if I can’t fold the covers straight to them.

How long do you save old magazines?

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My rubber thumb

Posted February 24, 2012 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities | 5 comments »

Meet my new favorite office supply: a strange, spongy rubber thumb cap I found at a client’s office. It’s covered in little raised dots and has a few air holes on one side, perhaps so you don’t overheat. At any rate, the intended use seems to be for flipping through stacks of paper or leafing through a book and preventing the pages from sticking together. I gather the official name is a thimblette.

Frankly, it’s nothing that a licked finger couldn’t also accomplish, but it’s a fun object to idly squish and squeeze and play around with, and it doesn’t take up much space in my drawer.

Have you ever used one?

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An inky mystery

Posted September 26, 2011 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities | 2 comments »

While I was sick last month, I started making my way through the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I so loved as a child. Of course, now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to put them down. And I was amused to read the following in The Hound of the Baskervilles:

If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else.

I daresay I’ve never been to a hotel that had fountain pens on hand, let alone a dip pen. But judging from the cheapo Bics they all seem to offer, I’d say very little has changed in the abstract.

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What are you reading?

Posted December 30, 2010 by
in Editorial | 16 comments »

One of the things I look forward to most about the holidays is the chance to do some reading. Of course, socializing with friends and family is my top priority. But at night (when I don’t have to worry about waking up early) or in the airport (where, as in the subway, engrossing material is key) or even during random lulls in the middle of the day, it’s so nice to sneak off with a book, or a stack of old New Yorkers!

I’m in between books right now, and for the past few weeks have been sticking to periodicals. But I’m ready to sink my teeth into something long again. The last book I read for pleasure was The Sportswriter, and for work was the memoir of British computer pioneer Maurice Wilkes. Though I usually get books for Christmas, this year, like many people, I got a Kindle instead. So my slate is blank.

What are you reading these days? Got any recommendations?

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What’s your favorite reading spot?

Posted November 11, 2010 by
in Editorial | 5 comments »

Image via Ken_Mayer

At home, my favorite reading spot is in the armchair in my office, preferably with the computer turned off and the sun streaming in through the window. The living room couch is a close second, though there’s more competition for the space and I often have to share.

Lately, though, I’ve been working on a project that takes me in and out of the city each day, and have been doing the bulk of my reading on the subway. Like many New Yorkers, I’ve gotten pretty good at finding poses to make this work, depending on the train’s crowdedness — leaned against the corner of a car or the back of a door, elbow slung round a pole so I can hold the book in both hands, or one hand on the pole with the book balanced on my arm. Sometimes, though not often, I get a seat. Either way, while it isn’t ideal, there’s nothing like the subway to help you gauge whether or not you’re truly engrossed in your reading. If something holds your attention in an awkward pose in a crowded car… well, I want to hear about it.

What’s your favorite reading spot?

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The Mezzanine and the Page-A-Day

Posted November 3, 2010 by
in Cabinet of Curiosities, Pens, Paper & People, Planning Tips | 1 comment »

I just started Nicholson Baker’s odd and excellent novel The Mezzanine, which takes place during a single trip up an escalator and conjures an amazingly detailed portrait of contemporary office life. Here’s one passage that made me smile:

When I came in early in the morning, I sometimes watched (through the glass wall of my office) Tina advance the date of the date-stamper … by a single digit, a performance that by now probably began the day for her, as her first office act—just as my turning ahead my Page-A-Day calendar, with its two hoops of metal over which you guided the holes of the postcard-sized page, to the next day (which I always did last thing the night before, because I found it deflating to confront yesterday’s appointments and “to do’s” first thing in the morning) had become the escapement on which my own life ratcheted forward.

Does anyone else turn their daily (or weekly) calendar pages forward the night before?

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Taming your RSS reader

Posted August 19, 2010 by
in Editorial | 6 comments »

I’ve got technology on the brain this week, it seems… my latest source of reflection: my RSS reader. It’s a godsend, of course, when it comes to keeping track of all the blogs I like to read. But, like my email inbox, it has to be managed daily or it quickly gets out of hand. When I go to a specific website, I don’t feel compelled to read everything that’s on it. When I see a long string of unread articles from, say, the New York Times Books section in my RSS reader, however, I feel like I can’t ignore them — I have to at least scroll through and cast an eye on each piece. If I don’t have time to do that, I let things pile up while I wait for the right moment to go through and take care of it once and for all. Once and for all!

This is madness, of course. Also crazy is my gradual desensitization to logging on and seeing many hundreds of unread items — a coping mechanism, surely, and a temporary one at best. Sure, I could cut back on my subscriptions, but then I might miss something good. I need some sort of personalized Reader’s Digest software… or else I need to get over my aversion to occasionally clicking “Mark all as read” and starting fresh every once in a while.

How do you manage your RSS reader?

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The view from Orhan Pamuk’s window

Posted August 4, 2010 by
in Beautiful Creations, Pens, Paper & People | Add your comment »

The New York Times had an interesting feature in Sunday’s “Week in Review” where they asked Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk to describe the view from his window. One sentence stood out in particular:

When my mind is busy with words, all by itself my eye moves away from the page and the tip of the fountain pen.

Also, isn’t this a great way to describe the interaction of a writer with his or her physical surroundings?

But I know some part of me is always busy with some part of the landscape, following the movements of the seagulls, trees and shadows, spotting boats and checking to see that the world is always there, always interesting and always a challenge to write about: an assurance that a writer needs to continue to write and a reader needs to continue to read.

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What are you reading these days?

Posted February 25, 2010 by
in Where to Go? | 9 comments »

We talk a lot about writing on this blog, and inspiration and creativity. But I’m wondering: what are you reading?

I just finished Janet Malcolm’s awesome work on the relationship between authors and their subjects, The Journalist and the Murderer, whose smart analysis of the story behind Fatal Vision is relevant to both fiction and non-fiction writers. Before that, Rebecca Goldstein’s Mind-Body Problem. I’m not sure what I’ll read next.

What about you?

Image by Wonderlane.

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