Literary Links

Why does experiencing ‘flow’ feel so good? A communication scientist explains

I’ve written here about flow before (here and here).

In this article Richard Huskey, an assistant professor of communication and cognitive science at the University of California, Davis, discusses how the concept of flow figures into his resolutions for 2022. He has been studying flow for 10 years “to better understand how the experience happens and to make it easier for people to feel flow and its benefits.”

This One Behavior Boosts Well-Being More Than Socializing

“Examining the effects of the ‘flow’ state.”

Psychologists Suzie Pileggi Pawelski and James Pawelski weigh in on the benefits of cultivating more flow experiences in our lives.

My pandemic book club changed the way I think about literature — and community

Christopher Frizzelle writes in The Washington Post:

As we creep toward the two-year mark of the pandemic, it feels strange to speak of the upsides of this awful interregnum. Nothing can make up for the lives lost and the communities ravaged. But perhaps there’s still something worth celebrating in the ways we have managed to connect with — and, sometimes, learn from — one another. Whatever happens, I hope that new institutions like my book club, with members in more than 25 states and at least five countries, will continue, because it has showed us that there are other ways of being together — in good times as surely as in bad.

In Praise of Search Tools

Deidre Lynch discusses the “expectations about knowledge and memory [that make] readers—in their working life, at least—want a book’s records, facts, texts, and even individual words to be locatable and retrievable”:

Over the centuries, bookmakers, printers, furniture-makers, and, recently, database designers and software engineers have devised finding aids, search tools, and sorting and storage systems that cater to that desire. To explore the technologies they have invented can teach us much about the ideas of information, efficiency, and speedy searching that define modern reading practices.

Lynch centers her discussion around two new books on the topic: Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan and The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson.

25 Favorites From 2021 That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

The end of 2021 recently brought about a deluge of lists of the year’s best books.” But it’s refreshing to come across a list like this from BookTrib, whose “ charter is to celebrate debut and emerging authors — the many lesser-known talents out there who are master wordsmiths with great stories to tell.”

61 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2022

A lot of readers are looking to incorporate more diverse writers into their reading plans. Here are some suggestions for adding “important, rarely told stories” to your reading list.

An Alabama family started an antiracist library to promote racial justice and the importance of diversity in reading

Here’s how a family in Alabama has spent some of its pandemic time to educate their community and support diversity in reading.

Kutztown 8th-grader creates Teen Banned Book Club

And in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, 8^th grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh has partnered with a local bookstore to create the Teen Banned Book Club.

Writers to Watch Spring 2022

“Adoption narratives, genre-bending novels about the horrors and inequities of life, and promising collections round out this season’s notable fiction debuts, some of which are already making their way to a TV near you.”

© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown