The Joy Of Reading

THE JOY OF READING M. HARIKUMAR 25 DEC 2011

READING IS THE MOST SOLITARY , CONTEMPLATIVE AND LONG LASTING OF ALL THE AESTHETIC PLEASURES

A Complex (?) definition
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols to construct or derive meaning. It is a means of language acquisition, communication and sharing information and ideas

“ Every (wo)man who knows how to read has it in his/her power to magnify him/herself, to multiply the ways in which (s)he exists, to make his/her life full, significant and interesting”
Aldus Huxley

“ .......it consoles, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wider kind. It is a moral illumination”

Reading is a fine art
In order to be better at anything – reading, writing, tennis, chess , public speaking - is to practice. The more you read ,the smarter you are. The more words you are exposed to, the more of language you see and have experience with , the better you are able to express and write

Gifts of reading
Reduces stress
Greater tranquility
Increases analytical thinking
Improves memory
Improves writing skills
Talk intelligently
We make time for what is important to us

Sources : Where to find books/magazines ? From Library to Cybrary E- book ( Kindle – Amazon. COM) Flip kart And of course – bookshops Amazon.com

How to find good books? Reviews (Don’t believe all of them ) Friends References Skimming & scanning in Libraries / Lending Libraries Book shops H

A Private Library - Antilibrary Umberto Eco belongs the small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful and non-dull. He is the owner of a large personal library more than 30,000 books A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool

“ You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older. The more you know the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books as “antilibrary”

Reading skills: Scanning : a useful first step before reading more deeply Skimming: handy when you are looking for particular things in a text

FAST READING
Rich Vocabulary is a must
Eye motion : See blocks words instead of a single word
( Former US Prez John Kennedy had a very high reading speed)
Regression: unnecessary re-reading
Concentration
Environment

Engineers are in general not good readers is a fact. Their knowledge on non technical subjects tends to near zero. Why? So far I am yet to find a definite answer ( The only exception I know is Anand the famous Malayalam novelist /short story writer, a product of CET )

What to read?
“ Any written material” is the answer
From Plato to Playboy

Film songs Innle neeyouru sundara ragamayen ponnodakkuzhalil vannolichu………. P. Bhaskaran

Comics
Phantom Lee Folk
Asterix
Bobanum Molliym
Cartoons of Gopikrishnan

Poetry How to start reading and enjoying poetry? Vallattholl Browning

Of course don’t forget dictionaries Advanced learner’s Dictionary - School level Longman’ Active English Collins Co-build Mac Millan’s book of Phrases Longman’s Activator Dictionary

Phrases
“ Carry coals to Newcastle”
Achilles Heel
“ Stay put” - If you stay put you remain in a place, job etc and do not try to move from it

American dictionaries Webster Random House Thesaurus Modern English usage Michael Swan “ Origin of words” “ How to build Vocabulary” series

English news papers Editorials, Central page article, Opp. Ed page Prasannarajan Rajakrishnan M P Narayana Pillai Prof M. Krishnan Nair

Time,
Economist,
Magazines
Time Essay, Cover story

History Toynbee Second world war Third Reich, Auschwitz, Stalingrad Nuremberg Jawaharlal Nehru Autobiographies My experiments with truth The Report to Greco, Words Kannirum Kinavum

Classics Upanishads Ramayana Mahabharata Thirukural Iliad Odysseus Les Miserables Crime and Punishment Jean Christofe

Short stories The fate of a man : Solokov Best 10 short stories in Malayalam Novels Garcia Marcus, Kazantzakis Sartre, Camus, Kafka Arogyaniketanam, Yayati Sundarikalum sundaranmarum The inimitable Basheer M T Vasudevan Nair,Anand O V Vijayan

Non fiction Future Shock and other books – Alvin Toffler The end of history and the last man The Clash of Civilization The world is flat The Lexus and the Olive tree

Humor Catch -22 ... MAD (now Extinct) Cartoon magazine Thrillers and Pulp fiction Sydney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer Frederick Forsyth, Chetan Bhagat And the immortal Sherlock Homes series

Dramas Ibsen Ionesco Camus Tennessee Williams Pirandello C J Thomas

Science fiction
Arthur Clarke
“ 2001 ASPACE ODYSSEY”
Isac Asimov
Popular Science
Carl Sagan
Paul Davies
“ A brief history of nearly every thing “ by Bill Bryson
“ The Ascent of man”

And finally your subject - ENGINEERING Example “Digital Communication” Read at least three of four books on the same Subject. Note how different authors approach the same topic. It gives you a better insight. And Read half a dozen papers also on selective topics Say “spread spectrum”

And Certain things are to be seen working
before you can effectively introduce those subjects in the class - examples
Gyroscope
SNMP

Quotations “ The London bridge is falling down...falling down...falling down...” a nursery rhyme This forms one line in the famous poem “The waste Land” by T S Eliot showing the degradation of culture

The famous Beginnings..... It was love at first sight” Joseph Heller Catch -22 “ It was best of the times.... “ Dickens “ Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” ... GarciaMarquez

Call me Ishamel” Moby Dick by Herman Melville
“ Mother died today. Or may be yesterday; I don’tknow...” Camus

Jot down sentences and ideas you like from what you read “ In my younger days I wanted to play cricket badly. Finally I got an opportunity to play and I did it. I played badly” Shashi Tharoor

“ If omnipresence is a sign of divinity, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi qualifies for it”
Time Magazine review of the movie
“ The making of a mahatma”

“ ... Some created history by arriving at the scene like MahatmaGandhi from South Africa, Lenin in a train to Finland station; some created history by refusing to leave the scene like Rosa Parks from a Montgomery city bus in the state of Alabama” Time Millennium issue

“ All cities are monuments: Tokyo symbolizes the victory of the new over the old; Lisbon the legacy of exploration; Calcutta a tribute to colonialism and Rome man’s most poignant footstone to war.......”
Time Magazine

“ We fought a military war; our opponents a political one; we sought physical attrition; our opponents psychological extinction ; In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose; a conventional army loses if it does not win...” Henry Kissinger

Churchill’s prophetic words: Guess about who? “ rogues, rascals and free booters...... “

Vaclav Havel : Czech Independence day – from Presidential speech “ My dear fellow citizens , for 40 years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme; how our country was flourishing, how many millions of steel we produced, how happy we were all ,how we trusted our government and what bright prospects were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for the office so that I too would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing... The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated environment; we feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.....”

During the sixty plus years of my existence(?), I came across bureaucracy , bad , worst , cruel and many times , - inhuman and criminal It may be so for so many others Why?

“ When you have disciplined people you don’t need hierarchy; When you have disciplined thought you don’t need bureaucracy . When you have disciplined action you don’t need excessive control. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic entrepreneurship you get the magic alchemy of great performance...”
An Utopia??????
I hope the following para will help you think of an answer ( Jim Collins in Good to Great)

Thank You

The Joy Of Reading

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