What I've Been Reading

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen. If you are not into books or an avid reader or want to be one then read this book.

Books without knowledge of life are useless, for what books teach but art of living.

- Samuel Johnson

On Developing your List of Candidates:
It is more helpful to consider the books you place on your list as candidates for your attention rather than obligations. Creating a list of candidates engenders an open-ended, exploratory process rather than a closed, prescriptive solution.

What are your categories? Fill them with books you'd like to read and start gaining the satisfaction of knowing you have a pantry full of good food for mind and spirit.

As your list and library of candidates grow, they will give you food for thought each time you turn to them. And as you begin to read these books, they will, preface, lead to other books and other interests. Interests are like candles, each one capable of lighting more without diminishing itself.

Mortimer Adler on writing our thoughts on the pages of books:
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake - not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written... Third, writing your reaction down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author... Marking a book is literally an expression of your difference or your agreements with author. It is the highest respect you can pay him. 

What counts in the long run is not what you read; it is what you shift through your mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

On Audio Books:
While commute times stretch out across America, an increasing number of people are listening to books and loving it. Those who study traffic congestion refer to these lengthening commutes as lost time. From an audiobook perspective it's not lost time, it's found time.

On Book Groups:
Reading confirms your aliveness. It's very validating. That's what book groups ultimately are; you get validated in the human condition - the condition and puzzles, the good stuff and bad stuff, the aspirations and hopes and despairs. You're not alone out there. 

The great secret of reading consist in this, that it does not matter so much what we read, or how we read it, as what we think and how we think it.

- Charles F. Richardson, Book-Lover