I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.
Honestly, I've been reading a lot of books on visual art. I've been reading a lot of books by Olivia Lang, I've been listening to a lot of folk and singer-songwriter music, but also a lot of electronic and really hard techno. I'm just trying to create something that pulls from everywhere and that hopefully feels unique.
For about a year, when we lived at Middlewick, I couldn't really go anywhere. But the children came and went as normal - they just got on with it - and so did great friends. I would pass the time by reading a lot - more than I'd ever have been able to in a normal life.
I've been on this kick reading about the beginning of forensic science: autopsies, fingerprinting, psychological profiling. I've been reading a lot of books about forensic anthropology.
Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.
My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.
It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.
At the time I wrote 'Forever,' I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.
What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'
I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Most of the time what I am reading is leadership books, books on the mind and a lot of deep stuff about spiritual stuff and Christian stuff. So most of my free time is spent reading. I try to read 1-to-2 books a month.
All I can say is I've been reading the lips of bleeped-out words, angry baseball players, and stoned-out rock stars on awards shows for years and it's been hilarious. Everyone is always asking me what the bleeped-out parts are saying.
A 45-year old looks a lot like a 25-year old who's been out all night. And feels just as good about having survived the experience.
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.
I was really unfit last year, so I worked out for a long time, then spent time by myself in Oregon. For about two months the only person I saw was my trainer. Every day I did a lot of running and I just didn’t want to talk to anyone for two months. So when I started talking again, it was like you would communicate wrongly, like you wouldn’t really remember how to speak. That was one of the key things as well as just reading the book, reading the script a million times, just figuring things out.