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The Art of Reading
- Narrated by: Timothy Spurgin
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
Artful reading - the way we read novels and short stories - is less about reading for specific information and more about reading to revel in the literary experience. Learning the skills and techniques of artful reading can improve your life in many ways, whether you're a fiction reader, an aspiring writer, a book club member, or a student.
And the best part: These skills are not difficult or unwieldy; rather, they are well within your reach. This entertaining, 24-lecture course gives you a veritable toolbox of knowledge and methods to approach even the most daunting reading experience with increased confidence.
You'll learn the definitions and characteristics of terms such as authorship, master plot, and genre. While some of these nuts-and-bolts concepts may be familiar to you, Professor Spurgin examines them from multiple angles, revealing hidden meanings that can escape even experienced readers.
Practical tips and techniques will maximize your effectiveness as an artful reader. You'll see why holding an initial reading session will acquaint you with the author's writing style and the characters, making the book easy to return to even if you take a few days off.
You'll also discover the benefits of "pre-reading" - exploring a book's organization and structure - and how to constantly ask questions to become more deeply involved with the characters and their stories.
Throughout the course, a host of literary "case studies" will refine and elaborate on the concepts of artful reading. Literary examples show how you can finally approach works that, in the past, might have seemed intimidating - making your future reading experiences both more engaging and more enlightening.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
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Intriguing, Engaging, AND BEST NARATORS EVER
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Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws. This bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other infamous strategists. The 48 Laws of Power will fascinate any listener interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.
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Justice Beth Garner (Sanaa Lathan) just landed the appointment of a lifetime—a seat on the Supreme Court. Now a mysterious company is blackmailing her for her vote on a landmark case. Caught up in the checkered past of her hero and mentor, Chief Justice Clayton Erlenborn, Beth must cunningly maneuver through a dangerous web of secrets, deception, and cold-blooded murder. Armed with only her moral compass and unflinching nerve, she’s up against a sinister world full of undercover agents, domestic terrorists, and black ops assassins—all of whom want her to comply or die.
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Money - investing, personal finance, and business decisions - is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money.
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Listen for the Lie
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After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all, and if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life.
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Entertaining and keeps you guessing
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The Teacher
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Eve has a good life. She wakes up each day, kisses her husband Nate, and heads off to teach math at the local high school. All is as it should be. Except… Last year, Caseham High was rocked by a scandal involving a student-teacher affair, with one student, Addie, at its center. But Eve knows there is far more to these ugly rumors than meets the eye. Addie can’t be trusted. She lies. She hurts people. She destroys lives. At least, that’s what everyone says. But nobody knows the real Addie. Nobody knows the secrets that could destroy her. And Addie will do anything to keep it quiet…
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One of my favorites
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
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Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative
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What listeners say about The Art of Reading
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John
- 10-02-13
The art of MISreading
What disappointed you about The Art of Reading?
I'm not inclined to write reviews. In fact this is my first for Audible. But I was so irritated by Timothy Spurgin's reading, I'm making the effort to warn others. In EVERY lesson he stumbles, typically by reading a word or two ahead then having to correct himself. In some lessons, it happened so frequently, that I found myself waiting for the next stumble and lost track of the content.
You may regard the odd stumble as nitpicking, but there are so many here and they occur with such regularity, that their accumulation is elephantine in size.
Perhaps he had the teleprompter moving too fast, but I'm more inclined to think it is a psychological problem. He may be an outstanding lecturer, but he is most certainly not the right person to deliver an audio presentation like this, and it counts as a big black mark against The Great Courses for enabling him to do so. On this evidence, Great Courses is not an organization who pursues excellence or takes pride in its products.
I would also add that the first 9 lessons or so offer nothing of value for anyone who has taken a high school introductory course in literature or creative writing, or has simply read about either.
I purchased this after reading Building Great Sentences, also in the The Great Courses series. It was full of insights and read impeccably. By contrast, this was a major letdown and if there was a way, I would demand my money back.
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42 people found this helpful
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- Troy
- 08-14-15
Practical for Readers and Writers
If you're a writer or a literary-minded reader, this set of lectures is insightful and immeasurably practical. The idea is teach styles and literary devices through example of works of great literature. Many of the examples used were not necessarily in my wheelhouse of normal reading, but the lessons still came across easily.
Prof. Spurgin is, on the whole, a good educator. His presentation is clear and well-constructed. I was often distracted, however, his delivery. It came. Across. At times like. William. Shatner. Should have. Been speaking. Ok, perhaps it wasn't quite as bad as all of that, but once noticed, it cannot be unnoticed. If you try this title out, apologies in advance for ruining that for you.
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38 people found this helpful
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- Phebe
- 07-21-15
Deepens my reading
Excellent! A charming, humorous teacher and many tips about how to see more in the fiction I'm going to read anyway. This is basically an introductory course on literary analysis, I'd say, and I loved the concepts of watching for the initial destabilizing event, and the two "master plots" --- a stranger comes to town, or the hero takes a journey. I liked the free indirect voice, the narrator voice that slides over into the psyche of the main character in descriptions. I liked a lot of the examples, most of which I was familiar with. I skipped the Russians and the experimental fiction of the early 20th century such as Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's stuff -------- because sometimes in life you have to make an executive decision not to bother with yucky stuff that's more a puzzle than a good read. Same with his discussion of Portnoy's Complaint: I bought that long ago because the New York Review of Books said to, and halfway through stared at it in dismay and distaste and realized something important: I was out of school, and never never never in my life ever again had to read anything disgusting because some poseur said I had to. (And I never renewed the NY Review of Books, either.) So none of our prof's "must reads" actually are musts, after all, because we are grown up. We can apply his tips to the books we like to read.
Also, I was puzzled at the prof's topic of "metanovels," novels about novels. Good, I thought, because there are a LOT of novels and short stories about writing, or books, or somebody stealing another person's writings, and I like thrillers with that topic. But it turned out to be a lecture on some wildly experimental fiction that sounded to me like "magical realism," that school of writing which bitter British writers say is simply fantasy by writers who happen to live in South America. However, I figure a lit prof is inevitably going to drag in some books nobody actually reads and short the popular ones: it's inevitable. He did NOT drag in Ahab and That Hated Whale, but he did have a good general lecture on descriptions, short or long.
Quick and light lecture series, I recommend it. I'm going to see if he's done any others.
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27 people found this helpful
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- C. Sneed
- 07-24-13
Endurance
The content is good. I don't like the cheap, synthetic applause that opens each lecture. I want to want to listen to this, and as lectures go, it's good. Still, it's a lecture. I could be listening to something more entertaining. If your focus is on writing better, then dive in. And yes, it does help appreciate good writing. But be warned, endurance is required to get through these.
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22 people found this helpful
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- Jessica Simonetti
- 06-03-16
Very informative and unexpectedly funny
I expected a lot from this series of lectures: inspiration to read (even) more, freshening up my college knowledge, learning new things and the opportunity to do all that whilst commuting by bus looking like a serious young business woman.
Unfortunately, the narrator is so enthusiastic and driven that a serious listening attitude was not always applicable and at times I found myself unexpectedly giggling at best, squeaking audibly with delight at worst. How I would have loved to be in this professor's class room!
The lectures are well organized and clear, the narrator keeps a nice pace and is very easy to understand.
Additionally, through these lectures I have discovered some intriguing new titles to try my new found expert reading skills on.
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18 people found this helpful
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- sara
- 09-09-14
So helpful!
Would you consider the audio edition of The Art of Reading to be better than the print version?
No idea.
What did you like best about this story?
It made me get so much more out of my reading.
What does Professor Timothy Spurgin bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He made me feel like I was back in a classroom, which I loved.
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9 people found this helpful
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- sarah
- 09-14-19
Understanding the craft of writing as a reader
When reading a book, I wanted to be more understanding/ mindful of what ingredients are used to distinguish a great book from mediocre ones. This was the right book for this objective.
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6 people found this helpful
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Story
- Karen Vasquez
- 08-02-20
Helpful
I originally chose this title to find something to help me fall asleep. I was surprised at how interested I became in the content and I'm a more observant reader for it.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- eclectic reader
- 04-09-18
Enriches reading including audiobook reading
I see why the instructors students think so much of him. He provides a sense that he is personally concerned about you and demonstrates his enthusiasm for the subject.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- An Amazonian
- 12-05-20
Excellent
Excellent. The best feature is the inclusion of practical games to improve your close reading.
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3 people found this helpful