(((I Will Outlive)))

Shabbos before the Jewish New Year!

Help Bubbeh Yenta get ready for Rosh Hashanah, and don't forget to tell the monsters to bring the honey.

https://amazon.com/dp/B0CC6HLP1H

good shirt from the market today

Please be a book hipster (my latest newsletter)

"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

one of the teachers interviewed for that article said the reporter flat-out ignored anything the teacher said that contradicted the reporter's thesis

she said her kids DO actually read books all the way through, including classics like the Odyssey, and the reporter just cherry-picked her words to focus on the books the class reads as excerpts only

remember that the atlantic is the same paper that wrote the scaremongering article about how kids are transitioning too fast and too often even though they didn't even have any examples

— Rabbi Laura Geller, “Mishkan Hanefesh: Machzor for the Days of Awe” (via nigheagnah-ath)

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I can behave normally around books

I can be trusted in bookstores and libraries and you should take me to those locations

- my 7 year old daughter

“You should be at the club.” No, I should be at the scholastic book fair.

Jewish tomes hidden in the attic of Riga’s last synagogue; Latvia, 1991

This isn't even an exaggeration

The poem is called the hadran alach and it's breathtaking. It's traditionally recited when you finish a tractate of Talmud, but some people say it for other books too.

it goes:

We will return to you, Tractate _ [fill in the name of the tractate], and you will return to us; our mind is on you, Tractate , and your mind is on us; we will not forget you, Tractate ___, and you will not forget us – not in this world and not in the next world. May it be Your will, our G-d, and the G-d of our fathers, that we should be loyal to Your Torah in this world, and it should be with us in the next world.

[alt text: tweet from maimonides nutz that that reads "The beautiful Jewish thing I learned today is that when we celebrate finishing a book we promise it that we will return to read it again."]

« It is often said that a person can only read about five thousand books in a lifetime. It is a small range of books given the accelerating quantity available to us. This limitation might lead some readers to rush their reading, thereby increasing the number of books. This response turns a reader into a tourist, jumping from experience to experience, noting only the highlights, being able to say he or she has done it, though not entirely sure what was done. Another response is to simply and happily acknowledge that life is indeed short, and that our smaller selection of books represents a unique expression of our character. This second choice removes the needless pressure from reading, and restores it as a great pleasure. »

— John Miedema, Slow Reading