What Kind of Reader Are You?

Image from article. Flickr/Simon Cocks

There are many different types of readers out there, but thanks to The Atlantic Wire's "What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide," you can now pinpoint exactly which category you fall under. 

From the article:

The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog includes a book-reader coinage that got us thinking about our own reading styles. There, Mark O'Connell confesses his dirty little reading secret: He doesn't finish books; he's a "promiscuous reader," a book abandoner. He writes, "I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else." But it's not the books, it's him. "I like reading too much. I can’t say no," he writes. "I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket." He justifies his behavior in the end, as you'd expect of a "book cheater," by saying that maybe occasionally this is a good thing. When he finally meets the book whose fickleness meets his own, well, perhaps he's met his match. 

We understand. We, too, have occasionally set one good book down and picked up another, and forgotten the first nearly entirely, even though we'd been quite smitten with it before. Sometimes we engage in threeways, fourways, or even orgies of reading, in which there are so many books involved, well, we might not even be keeping track. It's horrible, isn't it? But, for as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?

So, friends, where do you fall? I'm a Chronological Reader, with a little bit of Delayed Onset Reader #1 thrown in, myself.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Formicate v. To swarm like ants. "Principal, I thought you ought to know - the Seventh Grade is formicating all over the quadrangle."

Children always formicate around the ice cream truck.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Formicate appears in the First.

Godine's End-of-Summer Sale Continues!

Looking for a good book to read? We've always got you covered, but now is an especially great time to browse our website, thanks to our end-of-summer sale. Most markdowns are 50% or more, and some discounts are even deeper! They won't last long, so act fast.

Monday Blues?

Monday got you down? We have just the video to put a smile on your face. If only everyone were as friendly as this little girl at the Copley Place Mall.

Bye!

Superior Person's...Wednesday! (Oops)

We may be a day late (please forgive us!), but never fear - here is your Superior Person's word of the week!

Ozostomia n. Evil-smelling breath. Or so my source defines it. Not bad, you will note, not sour; but evil. How does breath smell evil? Is this the origin of the famous royal motto “Evil be to him who evil stinks”? Or have I got that wrong?

The Tasmanian Devil’s ozostomia is worse than his bite.

 

Each Tuesday (or the occasional Wednesday), we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Ozostomia appears in the Second.

Fauna and Family

We are pleased to re-announce Gerald Durrell’s Fauna and Family, the final installment in his beloved Corfu trilogy. Set on a Greek isle between the world wars, this autobiography concludes the wacky and often hilarious adventures of the Durrell family. Durrell, now a world-class naturalist, here recounts the origins of his passion for wildlife. Young Gerry’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for fauna of all types – snakes, lizards, birds, fish, and everything in between – sets the tone for a charming tale populated by a colorful and eclectic cast of characters, both human and animal.

An excerpt from Fauna and Family:

The Bootle Bumtrinket, being Leslie’s first effort in boat building, was almost circular and flat-bottomed, so that, with her attractive color scheme of orange and white stripes, she looked not unlike an ornate celluloid duck. She was friendly, stalwart craft, but owing to her shape and her lack of keel she became very flustered in anything like a heavy sea and would threaten to turn upside down and proceed that way. Owing to her shape, she could not wear a tall mast without turning over and so her pocket-handkerchief-sized sail could only garner and harvest the tiniest cupfuls of wind; thus, for the most part, she was propelled from point to point with oars, and when we had a full crew on board – three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon – and were carrying a full cargo – some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens – she was a back-aching load to push through the water.

One Times Square in The New York Times!

Our new title One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World, written and illustrated by Joe McKendry, has been garnering some well-deserved buzz in the book world recently. According to the Regional Plan Association, "McKendry's book elegantly fuses watercolors and words to tell the story of one of America's most iconic addresses." Another review for One Times Square was featured in a small newspaper you may have heard of - The New York Times!

Review:

Several miles down the grid lies another of Manhattan’s towering majesties, the chaos known as Times Square, the subject of Joe McKendry’s exquisite illustrated history, “One Times Square.” McKendry, who described a similar slice of urban architecture in “Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America’s First Subway,” traces the famed intersection’s roots back to early 1800s farmland, where a former brewer named Medcef Eden owned 70 acres that included a dirt path known as Bloomingdale Road, now Broadway. 

As the grid moved northward up the island, McKendry tells us, the intersection between Broadway and Seventh Avenue became known as Long Acre Square, commonly referred to as “the Thieves’ Lair.” (Some things don’t change.) Of course, its new name, which came along with the city’s first subway line, the completion of the Astor Hotel and – ahem – the new headquarters for The New York Times, was a lot more enduring. “Covering the event in its own pages, The Times crowed, ‘It is a name … not likely to be forgotten in this community.’ ”

McKendry’s meticulous attention to detail in his illustrations and text enriches both without weighing down the book in the slightest. Who knew the history behind the Motograph News Bulletin, or “Zipper,” installed in 1928 and a marvel of its time, even if it ultimately led to those annoying tickers on cable news television?  One of the Zipper’s operators, McKendry tells us, spent 33 years assembling the bulletins. Readers also learn just how an ambitious billboard designer made a Camel billboard that blew “smoke” rings across the square for a quarter of a century.

The book doesn’t skip over the less than jolly aspects of Times Square. McKendry dutifully describes the area’s descent into an alternately condemned and celebrated state of seediness and disrepair. A full page shows the Times Tower’s transformation from its Florentine campanile glory into the gray humdrum of the Allied Chemical Company headquarters. “By the mid-1970s,” McKendry writes, “Times Square had a well-earned reputation as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City.”

As an artist, McKendry is as versatile as Times Square itself, rendering sepia-toned watercolors just as adeptly as black-and-white line drawings, clarifying diagrams, streetscapes and full-spectrum painting. Much of the artwork feels deeply nostalgic, entirely appropriate to the subject matter – like leafing through an old issue of The Saturday Evening Post, with none of the pages falling out. Yet the layout, varied and lively but still with plenty of white space, feels entirely modern. This is both a handsome and highly readable book, one that will be pored over cover to cover by young New Yorkers, real and aspiring.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Vulpicide n. The killing of a fox other than by hunting with hounds; or one who does that. The italics are mine. A puzzling one indeed. This is the meaning of the term as given by both Webster and Oxford. Yet why should hunting with hounds be excluded from the definition? The implication would seem to be that there is a moral bonus, so to speak, in hunting with hounds; that this is an ethical way to despatch the wily Reynard, and that other methods are unethical. Yet what other methods are there? In what circumstances could the word vulpicide actually be used? "I say, old chap - passed a fox on the way across the meadow this morning - got him on the head with a four iron!" "You absolute rotter! You could have got out a few hounds and had them tear his throat out; but oh no, you just had to commit vulpicide!"

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Vulpicide appears in the Third.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Velocipede n. A light vehicle propelled by the rider - strictly speaking, by the rider's feet. A genuinely useful word, since it covers not only bicycles but tricycles, dinkies, toy cars, scooters, and the author's VW.

A velociraptor on a velocipede.

 

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Velocipede appears in the First.