Category: reading

stuff i’m reading at the moment

Sha Towers on

revisiting Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

Daniel Pink’s The Flip Manifesto: 16 Counterintuitive Ideas about Motivation, Innovation, and Leadership –which you can get just for signing up for Dan’s newsletter (and you should!)

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Brian Matthew’s Think Like a Startup: A white paper to inspire library entrepreneurialism

shallows

Sha Towers on

this quote from Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , is particularly annoying to me:

“for some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly – like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat. ‘i don’t read books,’ says Joe O’Shea, a former president of the student body at Florida State University and a 2008 recipient of a Rhodes scholarship. ‘I go to google and I can absorb relevant information quickly.'”

what is irks and saddens me about this is the complete shortsightedness, thorough lack of understanding about why we read. we don’t read merely for data gathering. we read for learning, for pleasure, for experiences, for encountering thought and art and beauty.