Reading

The Tottenville Branch will be having a book discussion of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert this coming Monday, November 17 at 7:00PM. Come join us! We ask only that you have read the book to take part in the discussion.

The Tottenville Branch is located at 7430 Amboy Road, Staten Island, NY 10307, and the phone number is 718-984-0945.

We will be discussing The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd on December 15.

Visit the Book Discussion Groups page for a full list of book titles, dates and locations.

In previous posts chronicling my reading habits and tastes, I’ve invoked the names of authors like Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Austen, and Shakespeare, perhaps giving the impression that I invariably spend my time with only the best that literature has to offer. Before you brand me an elitist (and ruin my chances at a future presidential bid), let me state for the record that I also have my guilty reading pleasures, and they often run right alongside my more literary pursuits. A difficult question is what makes certain fiction “popular” and other fiction “literary.” Although the best popular or genre fiction can have psychological depth, moral purpose, social insight, stylistic competence or sometimes even finesse. . .somehow you know you’re not reading Proust. One handy measure is narrative speed. With any of the authors named above, I slow down, savor passages, sometimes even do a bit of subvocalizing while I’m reading. Hearing the words play out in my head takes more time than absorbing great chunks of prose all at once, but when it comes to reading what does time matter except as a big, warm sea to splash around in? Books on a popular level are more compulsively gobbled, making them dicey choices for reading at night. On more than one occasion I’ve set down my breakneck-paced mystery just before going to bed with a sense of having stepped off a train after a long trip and still feeling the speeding motion. Inner speeding does not make for a good night’s sleep.  read more »

From the start, my goal in this blog was simply to emphasize what I regard as highlights of the library’s collection, specifically in the realm of literature . . . but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t another unifying element, or, if you will, a hidden agenda. Whatever else I’m writing about, I always seem to end up trying to convey my profound love of books and reading. This has long been one of my defining characteristics, long before there was a blog (or even an internet). Nabokov, in Lectures on Literature, writes: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.” Reading for me has always involved that aesthetic tingle; it has become as essential as eating or breathing. It is, of course, the subterranean stream which led me to become a librarian in the first place instead of, say, a hedge-fund manager. It is probably also the genetic anomaly shared by most of us who work in libraries; if it had been detected at an early age, maybe we could have predicted where we all would end up.  read more »

Our cast takes a bow at Staten Island OutLOUD’s annual performance of “Moby Dick” at historic Fort Wadsworth.

What is Staten Island OutLOUD?
Staten Island OutLOUD is a grass-roots dialogue and performance project. Several times a month, we present free gatherings in community settings throughout Staten Island. We gather to read aloud to one another from a variety of world classics and other compelling literature. There’s nothing to buy, nothing to prepare. Just come with an open mind; we’ll lend you copies of the featured literature. Anyone who wants to read aloud is welcome to do so; those who’d prefer not to, can just sit back and enjoy being read to. We draw a diverse, intergenerational audience. In fact, we bring together many people who might otherwise never have a chance to meet. We share ideas about what we’re just read, and enjoy hearing a variety of viewpoints. Most of our events are intimate, participatory readings, but several times a year we present large staged events with music. All our events are free.  read more »