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Lev Grossman suggesting a list If You Read Only 10 Cool Books This Summer! You don't need a reviewer to know which way the river a flowin
Shed, any inhibitions about raw escapism. You get back in touch with the tiny Philistine who lives in your lazy, pleasure-loving little heart. Why fight it? We took a look at this summer's guilty pleasures and picked out the most delicious we could find. Go ahead. You've been good. Have a summer fling with an unsuitable book.
The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders, more than half the population, have settled into apathy.
[Why hadn't this active act happened before? Jozef Imrich Punches Critic: The Literary Wars Turn Violent ]

Literature & Art Across Frontiers:
Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thinking about those other ways. Could we assume that it does so?
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Immature people crave and demand moral certainty [Visit Ursula Le Guin's Web Site ]
• · The world is suffering from a dark and silent phenomenon known as Digital Decay: New on the endangered species list: the Bookworm [An Austrian-born cartoonist ruins his life pining for Disney's approval and just a little credit More people in the world know my name than that of Jesus Christ
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