“In the tenth century…the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when traveling, had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.” [Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Penguin, 1996), p. 193]
Poetry Schmoetry
Between 2002 and 2008 the number of American adults who read poetry declined 31% (from 12.1% to 8.3% of the population). This according to the National Endowment for the Arts.
Said C.S. Lewis nearly 50 years ago: “Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done.” [An Experiment in Criticism (Canto, 1961) p. 98]
Name that Novelist [games]
Before you Google it, try to name the novelist:
“___________ is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pinpoint the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God’s amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ’s and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. … his constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer. ”
–J.I. Packer, The Gospel in ___________: Selections from His Works, (Orbis, 2004) vii.
Family Update Letter 2009
So you mailed the family update letter for 2009. You laid out a few color pictures of the kids and typed out some short updates, wrote it all from the voice of the family dog, and printed the letter from your cartridge-hungry home printer on some special Christmas paper with a green holly banner across the top.
I’ve done that.
I’ve never tried this:
For 2009 were mailing photo postcards. Note the future tense.
Magazine 2.0
Below is an 8-minute conceptual video of how the e-magazines of the future may operate. Recently Sports Illustrated launched a demo of a tablet e-reader device. Others will soon follow as the scramble has begun to produce the first widely accepted electronic reading device in the colorful world of magazines.
Which brings me to a question that I’ve been waiting to ask you rabid readers. For those of you who are familiar with reading books or magazines through an e-reader (like a Kindle), what have you noticed about your personal reading habits and experiences as you compare how you read the printed page with how you read digital text? What differences have you noticed? What similarities are you aware of? Which helps you retain more information? Which, if either, do you tend to read faster or more slowly or more analytically? I’d be very interested to know how the devices compare with printed materials, and especially books. Drop me a comment.
And have a blessed Christmas week!
Tony Reinke 