I recommend Tyler Cowen’s recent interview with Katherine Rundell. Here’s a highlight:
It would be really important to me [when identifying a writing talent] that somebody had understood that it matters as much or far more the way you say the thing as what you say, because the thing you want to say is probably a very similar thing that everyone else wants to say: love, love, my season, patience, courage, valiance, attention.
But there are only some people who have found a way to say those things with such flair and originality that they cut through your interlocutors, complacent inattention, and cut through time, cut through space, cut through cultural difference, and grab you by the wrist. So, it would be a sense that somebody understood — you are going to have to find a new and better way to say this.
Katherine Rundell – Conversations with Tyler Episode 168
See also:
Katherine Rundell
Katherine Rundell on the subversive politics of children’s books
Katherine Rundell on learning from children’s books
Katherine Rundell on children’s books and imagination
Books and Reading
“Led by pleasure and wonder”: Dana Gioia on creating a new generation of readers
Neil Gaiman on reading fiction, empathy, and changing the world
Reading: Oliver Burkeman on information overload, big rocks and the British Library
Deep Literacy: what it takes
Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely
Love and Clusters: (more from) Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts on Reading and How to Read
Trilogy: Books as Network
Misreading the mind: Ezra Klein and Nicholas Carr on transactional reading and contemplation
“I read a line and I like it enough to read the next”: George Saunders on Stories as Linear Temporal Phenomena
Schopenhauer on reading yourself stupid
What’s reading worth? OECD data on the economic returns to literacy
Slava Akhmechet on reading in clusters
Children in Understanding: David Hume on Reading (history)
McKinley Valentine (and Italo Calvino) on how reading changes the past
McKinley Valentine on the user experience of the whodunnit (and neural networks)
Steve Levitt on the user experience of reading David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell
Deep Literacy: Kevin Kelly on more than reading
Paul Romer on literacy, dyslexia, inequality and the joy of reading
C.S. Lewis on reading the originals
Clifford Ashley on folk art and reading as rivals
Seth Godin on physical books
Niall Ferguson on culture, text-for-profit, libraries, search and literacy
PISA: defining literacy
PISA on the changing nature of literacy
Canon: fences and trampolines
Writing and Reading as Technology Series
Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn
Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
Writing and Reading as Technology (8): Augmenting Reality
Writing and Reading (and visual art) as Technology (9): Virtual Realities
Writing and Reading as Technology (10): Elizabeth Eisenstein on the Printing Press and the End of the Information Famine
Writing and Reading as Technology (11): Writing Rules
Writing and Reading as Technology (12): Elizabeth Eisenstein on How the Printing Press Changed Books
Writing and Reading as Technology (13): Erik Engheim on Gutenberg vs earlier Asian printing technologies
Writing and Reading as Technology (14): Magical Paper Sizes; or, The Golden Non-Ratio
Writing and Reading as Technology (15): videos on the evolution of the alphabet and the spread of writing