The many benefits of reading

Recently I received a Penguin Random House email that touted the many benefits of reading. They included improving memory by activating the parts of your brain that create new synapses for memory; making you smarter by enhancing vocabulary, improving articulation, and increasing creativity; making you more empathetic by improving understanding of others' beliefs and views; as well as relieving stress and lowering blood pressure.

But this one made me laugh. Improves Sleep: Incorporating a reading routine into your bedtime ritual tells your body it's time to wind down and get some sleep. Because who hasn't snuggled into bed for a good read and only to blearily wake up some time later with the book flopped askew on a body part. And woe If it happens to be a weighty tome!

  

We do have one weighty tome in this year's bookgroup selections: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It was my nomination and a novel that I read rapturously back in my younger days, in the 1961 translation by David Magarshack (which I still have in battered paperback form). There are several newer translations, and I intend to read one of those this time. After our encounter with Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert in 2017, it seemed appropriate that we should share and discuss the story of one of the other most famous fictional 19^th century women. 

 

I doubt that Anna will be all that sleep-inducing, but I have been finding my eyelids drooping over next month's book: Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, a very unconventional novel, to say the least. Yet it is this sort of book that I might not ordinarily read that makes our bookgroup so worthwhile. I'm looking forward to learning more about this novel, this author, this culture, and discussing it with a group of articulate and open-minded women. If you are in the Dallas area and like reading interesting and often challenging books, please come join us.