Tag Archives: reading

Reading and Eating – Interchangeable

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2011

There are many similarities between the act of reading and the act of eating. In literature about food, words are dishes to be savored

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Classic Lit and Transformative Epiphanies

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2011

A student wrote, “By forcing myself to examine my ideas and Dr. Faustus more carefully and within the lens of my experience, I had several epiphanies that I feel were transformative both to my essay as well as to my understanding of my experience with depression.”

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Lit Beats Psychology Any Day

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2011

In addition to giving us psychological insights, literature also trains us to become better people. By engaging in the act of reading, Susan Cain says in a Psychology Today article, we increase our ability to empathize.

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Reading Literature, A Spiritual Practice

By Robin Bates | Published: April 3, 2011

McEntyre notes that, in the ancient practice of lectio divina, one sought to maintain “spiritual focus and equanimity” by “reading Scripture slowly, listening for the word or phrase that speaks to you, pausing to consider prayerfully the gift being offered in those words for this moment.” Ditto, the author says, for reading literature.

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It’s the End of the Book as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

By Robin Bates | Published: January 27, 2011

I crossed the great divide this Christmas and bought my wife a Kindle e-book.  I have to admit that convenience played a role in my decision.  Does it make it any more excusable that the first book she downloaded was a classic (The Brothers Karamazov)?  I didn’t think so. And here’s a problem I can report. […]

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Our Inner Library: A Quiz

By Robin Bates | Published: January 5, 2011

Last semester my Ljubljana friend Jason Blake sent me a passage from Alberto Manguel’s novel The Library at Night. A colleague of Jason’s was trying to identify all the literary allusions and was stuck on “first centenary encounter with ice.” It took me a while but I think I was able to identify it correctly, […]

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Fantasy Portals to Other Worlds

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2010

I have a special place in my heart for The Magician’s Nephew, chronologically the first of the Narnia series. When I was a child, I was especially fascinated by “the wood between the worlds.” This is a quiet forest in which can be found innumerable pools, each of which is the entrance to a world. […]

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A Poem for Those Who Love to Read

By Robin Bates | Published: September 22, 2010

  My father is a master of light comic verse, a genre often not taken seriously by literature departments. The ability to lift the spirits, however, is a precious gift that should not be underestimated. The following poem, about a lover of reading, is a reference to Jesus’s instructions (in Mark 4:21-22) that we not […]

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Barack and Huck, Babo, Hamlet, etc.

By Robin Bates | Published: August 26, 2010

I’m fascinated by the way that literature has helped shape and guide different American president, a subject I’ve written about in the past. Thus I was thrilled to stumble across a Barack Obama reading list compiled shortly after his inauguration. I don’t know how I missed it. According to the website The Curious Autodidact (great […]

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