Category: Reading

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

I have heard of this book off and on over the last few months. Most recently, John Warner mentioned it in his newsletter article about who should read his new book. What he wrote there finally put this book on my list to read. And my recently launched Daily Dose of Empathy project got me to read it.

The book is a review of the neuroscience and evolutionary history of how the human brain changes in order to read using practical examples of modern reading acquisition. Humans are absolutely not built for reading. But the brain being so adaptable, it literally changes in order to learn to read. And when people struggle to read (e.g. dyslexia) what differences are there in the brain? This book looks deeply into those differences and takes a first stab at trying to figure out the why of how this happens.

While this book is written in easily approachable language common to all modern nonfiction, it deals with the complex topic of neuroscience in general and the brain specifically. While I read a lot of that detail, much of it was more complex than I was interested in fully understanding. The book is so well written that I didn’t find that an impediment to reading or enjoying the more accessible information that I gleaned from reading it.

My rating: 4/5

The Green Door by O. Henry

For “Throwback Thursday” I have a less well known story by the short story master that they named the award after. This one is from his collection The Four Million, so called because it takes place in New York City, which had four million residents at that time. A young man is led by destiny to the door of a damsel in distress. It has his trademark twist at the end. Enjoy!

The Green Door by O. Henry (1906) – 2,679 words (about 11 minutes for the average reader)

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

A lone star shining in the night sky

I first read this classic story in high school. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1956. It is the story of a Jesuit priest who accompanies a mission to a remote star that expired in a supernova thousands of years ago. They are visiting the star system because a civilization lived there that was destroyed by the star’s explosion. But as the priest tells the story, he raises a surprising and important question.

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (1955) – 2,432 words (about a ten minute read for the average reader)

How to Read More Fiction (Not More Books)

Smartphone on an open book next a pair of eyeglasses

Everyone is wringing their hands about the dangers of smartphones and social media. Attentions spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter. The response? Banning cell phones in schools. Some teenagers are reducing the social media they interact with and turning off notifications. My teenage nephew only uses SnapChat and has all other notifications on his phone turned off. People of all ages are trying to get their attention back.

At the same time, many are looking to get back into reading fiction. Numerous studies show that reading fiction increases the reader’s empathy. As George R.R. Martin once wrote, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” But how to start reading, or get back into it, when your attention has been hacked to pieces in our smartphone era? For a lot of people, reading a novel has become a real challenge. My suggestion is to start with short stories. These can be read online for free all over the internet. If you haven’t already, consider taking all the social media apps off your phone. Then when you pull out your phone for a quick hit of entertainment the next time you are bored, read a short story.

But how do I find good short stories to read? Funny you should ask… Starting tomorrow, each weekday at noon Eastern Time, I will be posting a short description of and a link to one of my favorite short stories that you can read online for free. These will be in a variety of genres but since my favorite is speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) they will be over represented. If you aren’t a fan of those kinds of stories, give these a chance. My focus on what I am choosing is good storytelling and good stories more than anything else.

My hope is that this will help a lot of people who wish to move away from having their attention grabbed by an algorithm that merely wants to monetize their eyeballs by enraging readers. Instead, exercise your empathy muscles by reading a short story every weekday during your lunch break. Perhaps this will be just the start you need to start reading more fiction.

Someone in Time edited by Jonathan Strahan

I read this as member of my book club at my local library. We each read a different book on a particular topic. For the most recent meeting we read historical fiction that takes place prior to the twentieth century. I kind of cheated with this one. It is short stories and only some of them go that far back in time. But it seemed to be a hit when I told them about it.

The editor was able to get stories from a lot of well know contemporary authors of science fiction. The theme of the anthology was time travel love stories. The book’s title as a call out to the 1980 move Somewhere in Time was totally on purpose. There were sixteen stories in the book. Here are my brief synopses and ratings.

  • “Roadside Attraction” by Alix E. Harrow — After his girlfriend breaks up with him, a young man loses himself by going to the past over and over only to find his destiny in the present. (5/5)
  • “The Past Life Reconstruction Service” by Zeb Cho — A movie director recently dumped by his boyfriend keeps seeing him as he explores his past lives. (5/5)
  • “First Aid” by Seanan McGuire — In order to take care of her younger disabled sister, a woman prepares to go back permanently to Elizabethan England. (5/5)
  • “I Remember Satellites” by Sarah Gailey — When a time traveler draws a short straw job that leaves her permanently in the past, she has to leave behind a girlfriend to become a divorcée who causes the future King England to abdicate. (5/5)
  • “The Golden Hour” by Jeffrey Ford — A time traveler stuck in time reconnects with his time-traveling wife. (3/5)
  • “The Lichens” by Nina Allan — A woman in northern Scotland during the time of Culloden encounters a scientist from the future looking for a buried spacecraft. (4/5)
  • “Kronia” by Elizabeth Hand — Lovers who grew up a mile apart find each other through time. (2/5)
  • “Bergamot and Vetiver” by Lavanya Lakshminarayan — A woman from the 2500s travels back to the Indus Valley Civilization where the future’s leaders use her to steal water the man she falls in love with. (4/5)
  • “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente — A woman tells the tale of her romance with the personification of the space/time continuum. (4/5)
  • “Unbashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse” by Sam J. Miller — A young man regrets not walking his first love home, finding out the next morning that he has been murdered for who he loved. (4/5)
  • “Romance: Historical” by Rowan Coleman — A young neurodivergent woman mysteriously connects with a man from 1914 in the bookshop where she works. (5/5)
  • “The Place of All Souls” by Margo Lanagan — Two people who found each other connected in the space between times, find each other and struggle about what to do about it and how it will affect their families. (3/5)
  • “Timed Obsolescence” by Sameem Siddiqui — A man pursues a fling during multiple visits to the past only to find that his behavior there has affected his present. (2/5)
  • “A Letter to Merlin” by Theodora Goss — A woman from the future inhabiting the body of Guinevere in an attempt to keep the timeline on track writes a letter to Merlin who is also inhabited by someone from the future. (4/5)
  • “Dead Poets” by Carrie Vaughn — A female academic drinks from an ancient cup dreaming of meeting Sappho but instead goes back to 1536 to visit Sir Thomas Wyatt in the Tower of London shortly after the execution of Anne Boleyn. (4/5)
  • “Time Gypsy” by Ellen Klages — A woman goes back in time to meet her scientific hero only to fall in love with her and discover that her advisor in the future isn’t what he seems to be. (5/5)

The average of these ratings give the book as a whole a rating of 4/5.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Translated by Eric Ozawa

Once again, I was on the road for a soccer tournament. And once again, I was on the hunt for an audiobook to listen to during my drive. I dug into my list of novellas and came up with this one. It is has been on my list so long now, I have no record or recollection of why I added it.

A young woman’s boyfriend casually mentions that he is getting married… to someone else. The young girl is so devastated and embarrassed, that she quits her job where she works with her ex. Shortly after that, her uncle invites her to live in a small room over his used bookshop in Tokyo. Having nowhere else to go, she accepts. Naturally, her experience there and the space she has from her past mistakes gives her the room to grow.

As an American, there was a lot that I struggled to relate to. The main character feels a little too naive. But perhaps that is cultural. It certainly wasn’t enough to ruin a wonderful story. Between books and the love of her family, she starts to overcome her past. She also learns about her uncle’s past and their relationship grows. This is a sweet and relatable coming of age story set in another culture.

My rating: 4/5

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I learned about this book through Locus Magazine. In February, they had their reviewers list their best books of the year. Archita Mittra included Orbital in her list. On one of my regular road trips to referee a soccer tournament, I listened to this winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.

The book covers a day in the life of four astronauts and two cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Each chapter is titled according to each of the sixteen orbits taken in a single day. Not a lot happens in this short novel. Much of the book is given to evocative and vivid descriptions of the views from the ISS. We also learn a bit of the back story of those on board and how they are dealing with life on the station as well as how they are relating to their family left down on Earth.

Unfortunately, this book goes nowhere. Nothing interesting or exciting happens on the station. There is no inciting incident. I kept waiting for something to go wrong and for those on board to work together to overcome it. Nada. Don’t misunderstand, the writing is incredibly powerful and descriptive. You feel like you are experiencing what it must be like to be in orbit. And those on board have rich pasts and incredibly supportive relationships with each other despite the politics of their countries. But there is no plot whatsoever. This book is everything that English teachers love and their students love to hate.

My rating: 2/5

James by Percival Everett

This book was up for a lot of awards last year. Inevitably, I heard a lot about it. It was a finalist for the Booker Award and the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. My book club reads Black history or fiction in February and selected this book to read.

The easiest way to describe this book is that it retells the tale of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim. In addition to the fact that he prefers to go by James, there is a lot of the story here that is not in Huckleberry Finn. Everett gives us a glimpse into what he imagines happened to James during the times he and Huck were separated.

I started to write that this book is a gut punch, but that is not quite right. It is more subtle, powerful, and longer lasting than that. The enslaved speak in slave dialect as a choice, in order to help disarm the slavers into thinking of them as stupid and helpless. And yet the hopelessness and fear of being enslaved is palpable. No matter what someone enslaved does, they are guilty. The story really brings home the powerlessness of their position. And yet, in the midst of such overwhelming adversity, James finds a way over and over to express his own agency. This is a stunning work.

My rating: 5/5