How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen 

Home from school, suspended for bad behavior, I come to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird and hear the crack as Jem’s arm breaks as clear as I can hear the kitchen clock tick.  Lying on the beach listening to a transistor radio, I feel midway through Main Street the claustrophobia of small-town life, particularly for women, so acutely that the shiver runs all through me that’s said in superstitions to be a ghost walking over my grave.  And one afternoon in college I skip my seminar on writers of the Renaissance so I can finish Sons and Lovers, so swept away am I by the passion that a disappointed woman feels for her sons.  And I know that I will never, ever write as well as this, but that if anything even dimly like this power, to enthrall, to move, to light up the darkness of daily life, lies hidden like a wartime cryptogram within the Royal manual typewriter on my dorm room desk, I must try to make a go of it.  Why would anyone aspire to be president of the United States or of General Motors if they could write like D. H. Lawrence instead?  That’s what I remember thinking.  That’s not to say that I immediately set myself the work of constant writing; that, too, is a writer’s life story that I suspect.  But I did begin to think of myself as a writer, although I was not sure what sort of writer I was.  Like most young people, I went through a romance with poetry, enamored of the music and the rhythm of the words, and by the soothing notion that there need be so much less to the product than there was in even a slender novel.  In my own life, this romance fell in a predictable period.  It came after the end of elementary school, when poetry was something between a punishment and a spelling bee, “The Children’s Hour” committed to memory, and college, when I took a modern poetry course from the same professor who found Galsworthy beneath notice.  He had a fine, sonorous voice that rang in the small stuffy classroom, vying successfully with the sound of traffic on Broadway, and those half glasses that I still associate with intelligence even though I now wear, and loathe, them.  And when he read Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” aloud, dipping his out-sized shaggy head to the page—“For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry; to maintain ‘The Sublime’/In the old sense. Wrong from the start”—I knew that, whatever else I might be, I was no poet.  My books from that course are full of painstaking marginalia, as though if I paid close enough attention the bird would fly in my breast.  But I didn’t have poetry in me.  I wrote fiction in college, and then for many years I wrote fact, as best I could gather, discern, and describe it, as a newspaper reporter.  Then I wrote fiction again.  Reading taught me how to do it all.  “Books are over,” the editor of a journal to be found only on the Internet told me one day at a conference on the future of the newspaper business.  Just my luck.  After all these years of reading books I’d finally written one; when I took time to alphabetize my shelves, it came between Proust and Ayn Rand, which seemed representative of how I’d read all my life, between the great and the merely engagingly popular.  I could still remember the time I had held my first hardcover book.  The Federal Express truck raised a cloud of gravel and dust on a country road as I ripped into the envelope, removed the book, and lifted it up and down in my outstretched hands, just to feel the heft of it, as though it was to be valued by weight.  I held it the way I’d seen babies held at religious ceremonies.  https://bookreadfree.com/10444/290634    

January 7, 2025, Toledo celebrated its 188th birthday and has adopted a brand new city flag.  Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz met with the artist Mark Yappeuying yesterday.  He put so much care into the details of this flag to tell Toledo's From Fort Industry to the Veteran's Sky Bridge and our rich history–this flag is an evolution of our past flags, connecting our past to our present and future.  You can read more about the flag's design on the City of Toledo's website (https://toledo.oh.gov/flag?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=mayor&utm_campaign=www) , and tune into the Wednesdays with Wade podcast (https://toledo.oh.gov/government/mayor/podcast?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=mayor&utm_campaign=www) to hear the artist speak about his design choices and how he believes this flag represents Toledo's past, present, and future.  Episode 59 https://toledo.oh.gov/government/mayor/podcast?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=mayor&utm_campaign=www  

Even though they are different words, trouper and trooper can both be used to describe one who perseveres through hardship or difficulty.  Trouper originates from one who is part of a theatre troupe and thus realizes the show must always go on.  Trooper originates from the designation given to soldiers and police officers, who are also no strangers to difficult conditions in the line of duty.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-trooper-vs-trouper#:~:text=Trouper%20originates%20from%20one%20who,these%20triumphant%20actors'%20foot%20casts.    

Bitcoin (cyptocurrency) was first released on January 9, 2009. 

Proper noun  bitcoin

(uncountable, computing, finance) A decentralized cryptocurrency using blockchain technology. [from 2008] hypernym ▼quotations ▼

Noun  bitcoin (plural bitcoins or bitcoin)

(countable, computing, finance) A unit of the bitcoin (proper noun sense 1) cryptocurrency. synonyms ▲quotations ▼ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bitcoin#English    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2895  January 9, 2025