How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound

Description

What do we do when we read?

Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form.

These contributors share their own histories of reading in order to reveal the shared pleasure that lies in this most solitary of acts – which is also, paradoxically, the act of most complete plenitude. Many of the contributors engage in academic writing, and several publish in other genres, including poetry and fiction; some contributors maintain an active online presence. All are engaged with reading’s capacity to stimulate and excite as well as to frustrate and confuse. The synergies and tensions of online reading and print reading animate these thirteen contributions, generating a sense of shared community. Together, we open our libraries to you. This is how we read.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Practicing Reading, Reading Practice
Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Reading Lessons
Irina Dumitrescu

I Like Knowing What is Going to Happen
Anna Wilson

Read It Out Loud
Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Jessica Hammer
From When We Read

De Vita Lochini, or Commentary on a Life of Reading
Lochlin Brouillard

How I Read
Chris Piuma

How I Read, A History; or “San Francisco Banking Contains No Trans Fats”
Stephanie Bahr

Text to Speech
Alexandra Atiya

Phantom Sounds
Jonathan Hsy

On Not Being a Voracious Reader
Kirsty Schut

Sleeping Under the Mountain
Kaitlin Heller

Reading to Forget, Reading to Remember
Jennifer Jordan

Best Practice and Tips and Strategies for Academic Reading to Maximize Your Time and Productivity
Brantley Bryant

Afterward: The Parlor Scene
Kaitlin Heller

Available from Punctum Books.