Learning how to read right
Can I ask what drew you to read How to Read a Book?
I am 33. I haven’t read a book since before College. I graduated from USC in Business. I speak well, but we never had to read much. I just decided I wanted to learn how and see what I was missing. I know I have a lot to catch up on.
‘How to Read a Book’ by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler
Women journalists in Arab countries
My name is Nairi. It is Armenian. I am half Lebanese. I have been to Beirut and up in the mountains.
The book is about women journalists in Arab countries. Much of the time they cannot report from anywhere unless they have a man to protect them.
I am unemployed. I was working in public health. I need something different.
Have you been to any Arab countries? No.
Maybe you want to be a journalist? (I did not ask that but there you have it.)
‘Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World,’ Zahra Hankir (editor) Christiane Amanpour (foreword)
Life
My name is Arden. I design cars.
When you are on the highway and you see a Volvo Truck, that has my design work inside it.
What is your journal about?
Life.
What do you think of what is going on in Minneapolis? It’s crazy.
Scary?
Yes.
A notebook for planning
We are Josie and Maxine. Sure, take our picture.
We’re planning a “Survivor” party. It’s been on television for 25 years. We’re inviting 18 of our friends.
We are brainstorming the worst things that we can do to each of them! (Laughter)
That’s amazing you have so many friends. You get older, not so many.
I can imagine.
Thanks, have a great party.
‘That’s how I got here.’
What brought you to read, Under the Volcano?
Have you read Bolanos’ The Savage Detectives? There’s a Lowry quote before the book begins.
I remember Under the Volcano as a dark book. A granular book, a deep dive into being an alcoholic drinking Mescal all in one day in some town in Mexico. I read it in 1965 in Nigeria. I was in the Peace Corps and I had just arrived. I followed it with a translation of Dante’s Inferno. I must have had a real case of Culture Shock.
What do you do? What’s your name?
I’m Kendrick. I am a journalist for Reuters. I am out here to cover tech. I am from Rochester. I went to Duke.
My whole life has been on the run from snow.
Where do you put this project? Yes, let me see it on Facebook. Great.
Let me know if I put down anything wrong.
‘Under the Volcano‘ by Malcolm Lowry
The Zephyr
My goodness! You really fill the page.
It’s a new journal. I just got off the train. The Zephyr. Amtrak west from Chicago.
I met some real interesting people. I need to write about it. A great trip: mountains and people.
Where did I go to school? Wesleyan. Computer science. I like to use code to build models. That’s also my work. Yes, AI will take it all away, including my job.
It’s a whole new landscape. I am on my way to Tokyo and Kyoto. Thanks for stopping by to ask me.
Reading the prophets
Yes, it’s the Bible. I am here for the word.
A passport to existentialists
My name is Provatti. I tell people it’s “Provoke” but with “t’s.”
I am from Nepal. Yes, the park is a ‘low mountain’, much lower than the ones I know back in my home.
Computer science is what I do and study. Do I like to read books?
Oh yes. Now I am reading Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. I am about to read Nausea and after that it will be Camus’s The Stranger.
I love to read and use my journal to write and think about what I am reading.
Yes, sometimes I think I will always be a stranger in this strange land.
And yes, the politics these days make everything feel uncertain. But I want to suggest the experience of reading the book transcends the boundaries used to create and make a separate land unto itself.
Here the readers are citizens, the book a passport.
Existentialism and Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Stranger, by Albert Camus