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Review Summary: If you are like me, reading this book will take the normal intimate experience of entering an author's world and extend it into understanding how authors view and experience reading itself. As such, the book deepens the pleasure of your reading to another level by suggesting benefits that you may not yet have considered. On the other hand, I found that the book could have benefited from more editing. Many ideas are expressed in very similar ways, and many authors are repeated a bit too much for my taste. At the same time, the book's information on compulsive book collecting seemed a bit off the mark for my own interests. Review: The book opens with an essay on how electronic books can never substitute for the look, feel, and experience of handling a physical book. On the other hand, the authors fail to give electronic books credit for the things that only they can allow readers to do such as make very extensive easy references, allow the insertion of detailed notes and cross-references, and permit shared thoughts with many other readers in more detailed ways as you mark up a common electronic text. That essay seemed a little too conservative. The book is divided into reading, book, and book collecting subjects. Each one begins with a few paragraphs of commentary with an illustrative quote or two. Then the bulk of the section is comprised of aphorisms and sections involving a few sentences or paragraphs on the subject. In general, I found that the aphorisms worked better than the longer quotes. The book's sections are imaginatively named. I think a good example is using science fiction to help imagine what must be done in order to create a better future for all. May your thoughtful reflections on your reading build beyond the author's sound foundation!
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