Anne Faye

This is my 10 minute writing exercise in response to Erin Cupp's prompt on her blog : Theresa, a book tucked under her arm, meandered around the old college campus. Although she was several years older than most of the students, it was one of her favorite places. The ivy-covered buildings, the picturesque setting by Miller’s Lake, the trees just beginning to take on the colors of fall; it all brought her such a feeling of peace.  She found an open bench and sat against the weathered wood, cracked open the book and inhaled deeply. It was the smell of knowledge. An e-reader could never compare to the sensory indulgence of curling up with a favorite book selected from the shelves of her local library. She often wondered about the lives of books themselves: the people who had read them before her; the places they might have seen, the untold history she could only imagine. Today’s choice was a biography of Helen Keller, an incredible woman by anyone’s standards. She began to ...

On a recent visit to the Odyssey Bookshop , I picked up a free copy of the semiannual newsletter of The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies , part of UMass Amherst. For a free newsletter, this was a rather hefty tome, filled with intelligent articles. I greatly enjoyed my time perusing this publication. Just reading it made me feel smart, even if I didn't understand all the scholarly topics! One of the articles was "The Protean Virgil: Book History and the Reception of the Classics in the Renaissance" which was the text of The Classical Legacy Lecture delivered on November 19, 2013. In it, Craig Kallendorf discussed, among other things, the way that reading has changed over the ages. For example, in the 1500s, students were encouraged to write in their books, making comments on the passages as they read, focusing intently on each part. In contrast, today students are usually encouraged to look for the big picture. Part of this is due to the ...