Welcome to A Good Read
which should lead on to a better life
Some bookish thoughts...
Why read a novel?
From The Harvad Business Review:
Some of the most valuable skills that managers look for in employees are often difficult to define, let alone evaluate or quantify: self-discipline, self-awareness, creative problem-solving, empathy, learning agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, positivity, rational judgment, generosity, and kindness, among others.
How can you tell if your future employees have these skills? And if your current team is lacking them, how do you teach them?
Recent research in neuroscience suggests that you might look to the library for solutions; reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking.
When we read, we hone and strengthen several different cognitive muscles, so to speak, that are the root of the EQ [emotional intelligence].
DAVID M. WRIGHT
Long ago, inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the maxim, “Know thyself.” Reading literature remains the surest means to do just that—to live the life Socrates declared the only one worth living: the examined life. After all, literature may simply be the creative expression of metaphysics and being: In some mysterious way, each life is every life, and all lives are one life—there is something of ourselves in each and every character we meet in the hallowed pages of a Great Book.
Ray Bradbury
'It's reading, isn't it?'
From Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry
[On his second year at Uppingham.]
There was a context: there were fifty boys in the House, they had their own lives too and we were all touched by the outside world and its current fads and fantasies.
In my first year I had Fawcett as a friend, and later, a boy called Jo Wood, with whom I was to share a study in my second year. Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world.
But one day he said to me: ‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’
The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read. He taught me a lot about the human will, Jo Wood. But more than that, he was a kind patient friend who had much to put up with in our second year when he had to share a study with a boy whose life had suddenly exploded into a million pieces.