Reading in bed is a precision art

Reading in bed is a precision art – knowing the right wattage, high enough to read by, low enough to fall asleep with the light still on, choosing books not for their content but for their size and weight, knowing the right position in bed so the book won’t slide off and hit the floor and wake you again.

A. Michaels, Held (2024), loc. 1,059

The rise of the newspapers was itself an aspect of the explosion in publishing which took place in the mid-seventeenth century

The rise of the newspapers was itself an aspect of the explosion in publishing which took place in the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1500 just over fifty books were printed in England, in 1600 the number was 300, come 1648 more than 2,300 titles poured off the presses in a single year. Perhaps 30 per cent of all men and 10 per cent of all women could read, and over double those percentages in the capital, a readership now offered an addictive weekly news fix that involved them as never before in the turbulent goings-on of their kingdom.

A. Keay, The restless republic (2022), loc. 2,044

Two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky

My mother wasn’t alone, all of her friends were like this, too—the first generation of Soviet intelligentsia who had grown up on Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov...on Marxism...Could you imagine my mother sitting down and embroidering something or going out of her way to decorate our house with porcelain vases or little elephant figurines...Never! That would be a pointless waste of time. Petit bourgeois nonsense! The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.

S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013), 224

A deep, pathological loathing, for that word - 'reread'

The writer Conrad Williams, has a dislike, if not a deep, pathological loathing, for that word - 'reread'. I know what he means. At least, I think I do. You know the sort of the thing 'I'm rereading Proust.' 'I was rereading Hamlet the other day' 'This summer, when we go to Tuscany, I am looking forward to rereading Nakokov's stories.' That sort of thing. They want you to know they've read Proust or Hamlet or Nakokov's stories before. In fact they're terrified lest you think they're so ignorant and poorly read that they're only just getting round to reading Proust or Hamlet or Nakokov's stories.

N. Royle, White spines: confessions of a book collector (2020),13 

(Winsome doesn’t think Hazel should be in their reading group)

She and the reading group had a big argument, no, it wasn’t no argument, it was a debate, the other day, about whether a poem was good because they related to it, or whether it was good in and of itself

Bernadette said it was up to the literature specialists to decide what was good, they only knew whether they liked something or not

Winsome agreed, she wasn’t no expert

Celestine said poetry was made deliberately difficult so that only a few clever people could understand it as a way to keep everyone else in the dark

Hazel said novels was better value than poetry books because they had more words in them, poetry books was a rip-off
(Winsome doesn’t think Hazel should be in their reading group)

Dora said there was no such thing as objective truth and if you think something’s good because it speaks to you
it is
why should Wordsworth or Whitman, T. S. Eliot or Ted Hughes mean anything special to we people of the Caribbean?

Winsome made a note to go to the library to look those names up

B. Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019), 253-4

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witness to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there it is part of us, I have notices that many people make a note of the day, month,, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, an umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

C.M. Dominguez, tr. P. Sis, The house of paper (2004), 14

When reading Dickens aloud in bed, do not, on any account, attempt to do all the voices.

There is a limit to how much pleasure you can share. Try to avoid reading aloud so many passages from your book that you ruin it for your partner when he or she has a turn at reading it; avoid reading out a witty phrase or a telling observation if it means you will have to take fifteen minutes to set the scene with an explanation of the plot and description of the characters involved. When reading Dickens (say Pickwick Papers) aloud in bed, do not, on any account, attempt to do all the voices.

O. Pritchett, 'Pillow talk' Slightly Foxed 37 (2013), 29