“‘Oh, hurry up and get the supper work done so we can read,’ Mary said eagerly. But Ma said, ‘Never mind the work, Laura! Read us a story!'” ~By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Archives
Saturday Review of Books: June 3, 2017
“What I did understand was the pleasure that good stories offer and the power of books to introduce me to lives and experiences beyond my own.” ~Rudine Sims Bishop
Saturday Review of Books: May 27, 2017
“Reading is a respite from the relentlessness of technology, but it’s not only that. It’s how I reset and recharge. It’s how I escape, but it’s also how I engage. And reading should spur further engagement.” ~Will Schwalbe
Saturday Review of Books: May 20, 2017
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ~George Bernard Shaw
Saturday Review of Books: May 13, 2017
“Printers ink has been running a race against gun powder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gun powder in half a second while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for century.” ~The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley
Saturday Review of Books: May 6, 2017
“You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.” ~Jane Austen
Saturday Review of Books: April 29, 2017
“I hate to read new books. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes: one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either.” ~William Hazlitt
Saturday Review of Books: April 22, 2017
“As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the respondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.” ~E.B. White
Saturday Review of Books: April 15, 2017
“There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.” ~John Updike
Saturday Review of Books: April 8, 2017
“Katy was naturally fond of reading. Papa encouraged it. He kept a few books locked up, and then turned her loose in the Library. She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn’t get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn’t do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more till it was time to go home.” ~What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge