reading notes & textual adventures

34 notes

For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’—the ‘seeing stone’ that let’s the wizard see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that the users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

43 notes

[David Foster Wallace] struggled for years to get to grips with the work and, says Franzen, who was a close friend, “If he’d finished it, I think he’d be alive today. Boredom is a tough subject to tackle in a novel and, arguably, Dave died of boredom.

77 notes

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.