From The Bullet Swallower, by Elizabeth Gonzalez James:
At his desk, he stuck one finger under the front cover and flopped [the book] open, sending out a filthy little cloud of dust. He skimmed over the first few pages and they were all preamble, invocations to various saints and bellicose forewarnings, all written in a painfully florid style that came into vogue when people lived in one pigsty village their whole lives, never had to sit in traffic, and could spend years reading a single book.
From “How to Host a Medieval Holiday Party,” Weird Medieval Guys (Link opens in Spotify)
I leave the interpretation of that statement as an exercise to the reader.
This sort of sounded like a quote when host Olivia Swarthout said it, so I had to do some digging. I was delighted to find that “exercise to the reader” is a long-standing academic in-joke.
From “The Dream of a Universal Library,” by Robert Darnton (New York Review of Books)
The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization.
The librarians I know (and me, too!) tend to be on the side of the democratization and swear a lot about how the commercialization gets in the way of us helping people access information. :: shakes fist at publisher embargos :: Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, terrified me with its portrait of the literal devouring and commodifying of whole libraries. This book still freaks me out.
