Laundry day book definition, and “Reading Matters”

My friend said I need to define the term “Laundry Day Book” if I’m going to keep using it because who wants to go back and read all the posts trying to figure out what I’m talking about.

Laundry Day Book  it has to be a book you can put down and pick up again, nothing too intense so you can stop and move clothes from the washer into the dryer, nothing too unputdownable so the dryer clothes don’t remain there to become hopelessly wrinkled.

So while I’m on here, I found a quote in WLT (World Literature Today), University of Oklahoma literary magazine, that I would like to share and hope I take to heart when writing in my blog.

“We readers who say we want to share our love of books all too often choose to act as commentators.   As interpreters, analysts, critics, and biographers, smothering great works in pious testimonies. Victims of our proficiency, the words in books give way to our own. Rather than allowing a book’s intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut its doors: Reading matters!”

from The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac 

(forthcoming from Candlewick Press in November 2008)

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