psychology dector

“I began as I would go on—reading.”   Talk about fantastic first sentences.   Those words begin Robert Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader:   A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and they immediately establish that even though Gottlieb has worked his entire life as an editor, first at Simon and Schuster, then at Knopf, and after that, at The New Yorker followed up with freelance editing, service to the board of the New York City Ballet, and finally, as a writer, he remains at heart a reader.   He has edited everything and everyone, from literature to trash, and he recounts in detail the struggles and triumphs of the written word shaped by a writer and a good editor. The story begins at the beginning with a tale of how a boy became a reader and then an editor.   It is full of magic moments with books and texts, and for the diehard book-lover who thrives on the printed word, there is a lot to be thrilled about in this book.   Gottlieb reinforces the idea th...

I have spent the waning days of August reading, or in some cases, rereading, essays.   Not student essays.   Not yet.   Professional essays— Montaigne , Emerson, Joan Didion , Jo Ann Beard, Stuart Dybek, and a host of others.   It is my yearly tune up for fall classes and student writers.   The definition of the word “essay” comes from a French word, essai, meaning “attempt.”   When I sit down to read an essay, or to write one, I expect an attempt, not an absolute. Essays begin with questions, and it is the questions that lead us home, both as writers and readers.   Once we have questioned, we learn, we formulate opinions, we comment upon, and we relate what we have learned to our lives.   That is the complete equation, and the source of all learning.   Therefore, I changed the subtitle of the blog to:   “Questions.   Comments.   True Stories of Adventure.”   It is a phrase I have used in all of my classes for 26 years. ...

As the days of the spring semester draw to a close, I’ve been working with many Chinese exchange students on their English papers.   Even though they took extensive English courses in China, they struggle with writing in English while thinking in Chinese.   They do, however, often come up with pure poetry. Almost every student wants to stay in America after the semester ends.   They tell me the teachers are better here and more exciting.   Many say they will immediately request another student visa to return to the states for graduate school.   However, the rules in China are strict; they were allowed this semester abroad and now they must return home.   No exceptions. One student, a film major, wrote a particularly moving piece about her time here and connected her experiences to her course reading of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010) .   She found herself deeply moved by See’s protagonists, Pearl and her sister May. ...

When any writer takes on the subject of reading in the digital age, he must understand that this is not new territory.   The digital age is aging, and the landscape shifts like sand on the beach at high tide.   To me, there is no better book about the state of reading right now than Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies (Faber & Faber, 2006).   However, there is always more to be said, and in that spirit, Andrew Piper takes a crack at 21 st century reading in his 2012 entry, Book Was There:  Reading In Electronic Times (University of Chicago Press, 2012). From the start, Piper assures us that the current so-called crisis in reading is nothing new.   It is true:   reading books has withstood the challenge of movies, television, audio books, and e-readers, yet Bowker.com reports that more than three million hard copy books were published in 2010.   The big change in that statistic is the rise of print-on-demand titles, which accounted for approx...