An app called Blinkist costs $12.99 a month and is designed to help you achieve your New Year resolution to "read" more books. Blinkist offers brief summaries that give the book's gist, but, since it's focused on nonfiction, its 7,000-book library doesn't include novels like Franz Kafka's "The Castle." However, descriptions and reviews of over 250,000 novels can be had gratis by everyone with a free public library borrower card who uses the library's NoveList database. NoveList is designed to help readers find the very book. They can search by author, title, subject, genre, and much more. For instance, you can design a personalized book search by choosing among themes ("Character," "Family and Relationships," "Narrative Devices," etc.), historical and geographical settings, and tone. The "tones" of the novels range from amusing and bittersweet to heart-wrenching and irreverent to steamy and "strong sense of place." The tone of "The Castle," for instance is described as "Creepy; Bleak; Atmospheric," and Kafka's writing style is "Stylistically complex." NoveList says "The Castle" was originally translated into English in 1930 by Willa and Edward Muir, who "tone[d] down Kafka's 'ominousness' and 'normalized' his deliberately eccentric syntax and punctuation." Mark Harmon's 1998 translation "reproduced as closely as possible Kafka's style, which results in an English that is stranger and denser than the Muirs' elegant work."
In 2007 Mexican artist Jorge Mendez Blake constructed a brick wall traveling art installation titled "El Castillo," or "The Castle" in Spanish. According to the Mauler Institute ("Helping Students Get Accepted to Highly Selective Schools") "the mortar-less wall bulges at the site of the inserted text, creating an arch that extends to the top of the precarious structure …. he constructed a 75 x 13 foot brick wall that balances on top of a single copy of Franz Kafka's 'The Castle.' …. Méndez Blake specifically selected 'The Castle' to pay tribute to Kafka's lifestyle and work .... This minimal, yet poignant presence is reflected in the brick work—Kafka's novel showcasing how a small idea can have a monumental presence." Before launching into your resolution to read more books by starting with "The Castle," consider how much fun such a daunting read might wind up being. That's the central point in "If Your New Year's Resolution Is to Read More Books This Year, This Is Why You Shouldn't," an article by Max Lui in The Guardian. Lui pointed out that too often "we are forgetting to read for pleasure …. Pictures of 'all the books I read this month' are ubiquitous on social media and, in an era when we seem to live through one crisis after another, reading nonfiction has become a way of keeping up .… It is understandable that we read to try to make sense of events, but it can also fuel the notion that reading is a chore, which it absolutely is not."
A counterpoint's provided by a Betterreading.com article, "10 New Year's Resolutions for Book Lovers." One of their 10 resolutions is to "make a habit of stopping by our Better Reading Facebook Page," but my better half (in so many ways) has met most of the nine remaining resolutions for years. Starting a book club doesn't interest her, nor does another Betterreading suggestion to set goals to read a set number of books a year, but she's on top of devoting more time to deep reading, keeping a book diary, spending less time on screens, and keeping your books well-organized, sharing them with friends, and she reads widely, and especially "embraces the classics!" Reading fiction enhances many important aspects of the brain, including empathy and openness to other perspectives, and comprehension is significantly higher when reading a print book. Comprehension skills are rather important in life, and should be exercised regularly, something screen reading does poorly. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world." Great books, and sometimes not so great ones, can bring about tremendous personal transformation. For proof of that look no further than Richard Greener and his daughter, Belle da Costa Greene, one of the greatest 20th century librarians.
Richard Greener's life was a litany of tremendous achievement and personal transformation. He was born in Philadelphia in 1844 and had to quit school at age 11 to help support his family after his father joined the California gold rush and never returned. Nevertheless, Greener remained a voracious reader, and one of his employers enabled him to attend Oberlin College before transferring to Harvard as its first experiment in admitting Black students. There he won the coveted Bowdoin Prize twice and became the school's first Black graduate (with honors), thereby paving the way for all the Black Harvard students who followed him. He was South Carolina University's first African American professor, teaching mental and moral philosophy, Latin and Greek, International Law, and the U.S. Constitution, while also serving as a university librarian helping reorganize the library's collection that was in disarray following the Civil War (today Greener's statue stands outside the SCU library). In his spare time he graduated from the SCU law school and went on to teach and become dean of Howard University's law school. Throughout it all Greener worked tirelessly for civil rights.
When he learned that his wife had been listing them and their six children as white on census forms, Greener was furious and moved out. They never divorced, but soon thereafter he "became the first African American diplomat to represent the United States in a white majority country when he was appointed to a post in Russia, leaving his wife and children behind." While Greener was in Vladivostok as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War, he had a Japanese common-law wife and three more children. Upon returning he moved to Chicago to practice law and died there. Meanwhile, his first wife, Genevieve Ida (nee Fleet), distanced the family from Greener by changing the family's last name to Greene, her maiden name to Van Vleit ("in an effort to assume Dutch ancestry," according to Wikipedia), and moved the family to New York where they could more easily pass as white. Her daughter, Belle, who was slightly more darkly complected, changed her middle name from Marion to "da Costa" and began claiming a Portuguese ancestry.
Belle was hired in the administrative offices of Columbia University where she met the philanthropist Grace Hoadley Dodge who paid for her to attend the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies. This led to her taking a basic six-week course in library science that resulted in a job at the Princeton University Library. There she met Junius Spencer Morgan, who introduced her to his uncle, the multi-millionaire bibliophile J. Pierpoint Morgan, who hired her in 1905 to be his personal librarian and catalog and organize his huge collection of rare books. Belle poured herself into reading up on incunabula (books printed from Gutenberg's 1450s Bible, the first printed book, to 1501), bindings and rare books and became so expert in the field that in three years she was representing Morgan at major European auctions.
Belle Greene was attractive and vivacious, and the New York Times referred to her as "a force of persuasion and intelligence." She usually had her way at auctions, charming and outbidding far more experienced experts. She also excelled at getting rare books through customs undetected, endearing her to J. Pierpoint's avaricious heart, as did her assistance at avoiding income taxes. Greene's conniving had a noble purpose. As described in her Wikipedia page, "She was particularly focused on making rare books accessible to the public, rather than locked away in the vaults of private collectors. She was quite successful in this regard; for instance, when the Morgan Library became a public institution and she was named its first director in 1924, she celebrated by mounting a series of exhibitions" that drew hundreds of thousands. This fall the Morgan Library is hosting a centenary "exhibition devoted to the life and career of its inaugural director."
She never married, and the Bluestocking Salon's online article about her states that "Belle's close personal and romantic relationships are mostly estimations. Throughout her career, rumors pervaded concerning her scandalous affair with J. P. Morgan, as their relationship certainly extended beyond professional. When asked about being his mistress, Belle is quoted as responding, 'We tried!'" Resolutions are nothing but deciding to try, and Belle personified author Madalyn Beck's advice to "Start over, my darling. Be brave enough to find the life you want and courageous enough to chase it. Then start over and love yourself the way you were always meant to."
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