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Showing posts from January, 2019

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s “ Ready Player One ” is a book filled with references to video games, virtual reality, ’80s pop-culture trivia, geek heroes like E. Gary Gygax, and funny-sounding cult items like Frobozz and Raaka-Tu. Yet it works for people who like books without pictures too. Mr. Cline is photographed on the jacket standing in front of an open-flapped DeLorean, like the one in “Back to the Future.” He looks a bit like the filmmaker Kevin Smith, one of the few people on the planet who may be capable of catching all of Mr. Cline’s geekoid references. (Mr. Cline himself wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film “Fanboys,” about unusually fanatical “Star Wars” devotees.) Another is the science-fiction writer John Scalzi, who has aptly referred to “Ready Player One” as a “nerdgasm.” There can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set “ Ready Player One ” certainly looks like a genre

Why I Love Reading Real Books

Why I Love Reading Real Books I read novels online every 2 weeks or so, which adds up to about 25 books per year. As a rule, I always read at least free books online every day. Often it is a lot more than that. I squeeze reading in whenever I can?—?primarily weeknights before bed and then throughout the weekend. Of course this pales in comparison to some notable voracious readers, such as Bill Gates (50+ books per year) and Warren Buffett (500+ pages per day). I read books primarily to learn, grow, and feed my curiosities. This means that I mostly read non-fiction books about my passions of personal development, healthy lifestyle, and business/marketing. While I certainly learn every day on the job, books are a gateway to deeper knowledge within my profession and a way to dive into areas unrelated to my day job. My personality is best-suited to deep exploration of a limited number of subjects, rather than casually flipping from topic to topic. Therefore I greatly prefer reading full

Why Reading Books Should Be Your Priority, According to Science

When was the last time you read free novels , or a substantial magazine article? Do your daily reading habits center around tweets, Facebook updates, or the directions on your instant oatmeal packet? If you’re one of countless people who don’t make a habit of reading regularly, you might be missing out: reading has a significant number of benefits, and just a few benefits of reading are listed below. 1. Mental Stimulation Studies have shown that staying mentally stimulated can slow the progress of (or possibly even prevent) Alzheimer’s and Dementia, since keeping your brain active and engaged prevents it from losing power. Just like any other muscle in the body, the brain requires exercise to keep it strong and healthy, so the phrase “use it or lose it” is particularly apt when it comes to your mind. Doing puzzles and playing games such as chess have also been found to be helpful with cognitive stimulation. 2. Stress Reduction No matter how much stress you have at work, in your persona

Books Should Be Your Priority, According to Science

More than a quarter--26 percent--of American adults admit to not having read even part of a free novels online within the past year. That's according to statistics coming out of the Pew Research Center. If you're part of this group, know that science supports the idea that reading is good for you on several levels. Reading fiction can help you be more open-minded and creative According to research conducted at the University of Toronto, study participants who read short-story fiction experienced far less need for "cognitive closure" compared with counterparts who read nonfiction essays. Essentially, they tested as more open-minded, compared with the readers of essays. "Although nonfiction reading allows students to learn the subject matter, it may not always help them in thinking about it," the authors write. "A physician may have an encyclopedic knowledge of his or her subject, but this may not prevent the physician from seizing and freezing on a diag