Link Banana

Richard Wilson writes an incredibly enjoyable list of ten books you probably shouldn’t read before you die. His reasons are probably the most fun. On The Lord of the Rings:

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

(via Ideas)

Tyler Cowen (he of Marginal Revolution fame) thinks you should throw out less-than-great books you’ve read.

If you donate the otherwise-trashed book somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that person reading some other book instead.

…A lot of books don’t make the cut of “above average to those readers they will attract” and of course since you’ve spent some time with the volume you ought to be in a position to know. (But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book can be useful because it might appeal to “bad” readers and lure them away from even worse books. Please make all the appropriate calculations here.)

The worst thing you can do is to give such a book to a friend or family member. You are tempting them, but with mediocrity.

So all you altruists out there, ready your trash can and exercise your elbow. See if you can toss a book into the bin with one fell swoop from across the room. The love of humanity demands it.

Not terribly surprising, but still interesting:

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

(via brijit, though I should note that this was on clusterflock a month ago)

I probably wouldn’t be linking to this cute/strange/odd essay from the NY Times Book Review were it not for what Austin Kleon (a recent favorite) had to say about it:

last night we watched MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, and this morning I read this essay. these poor, miserable, over-educated, imbred [sic] bastards. doomed to loneliness. this whole stupid American Hologram has somehow convinced us that we are what we consume — and intellectuals buy into it just as much as anybody else. “You’ve never read Nabokov? Oh, I could never marry you.” Losers. A nation of losers.

This is a pretty interesting little web application, even if I have no personal use for it. Instapaper is basically a way to “save this for later.” I use bookmarks to do the same thing — which is what I understand bookmarks were made for — but you may want to use it if you regularly browse the internet on more than one computer.

(via cubicle17)