Boze the Library Owl

Chatbots and AI slop are going to ruin countless brains. Yours doesn't have to be one of them. Study history. Read poetry. Get acquainted with Bach, Shakespeare, George Eliot. In a time when people are rapidly getting dumber, we need communities devoted to the life of the mind.

amazing tweet

very well said.

Saw someone say, “Stop hoarding books, we don’t need paper books anyway” and I can’t express how misguided this is. Online libraries disappear, digital books can be altered, and with Big Tech seeking to destroy history and literacy, print media has never been more essential.

Saw someone say, “Stop hoarding books, we don’t need paper books anyway” and I can’t express how misguided this is. Online libraries disappear, digital books can be altered, and with Big Tech seeking to destroy history and literacy, print media has never been more essential.

“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.”

The part of Orwell's 1984 that everyone forgets is how human music has been replaced by soulless, machine-generated pop songs. The AI attempt to take over the film and music industries is an attack on the human spirit. Boycott AI actors. Boycott AI bands. Support human artists.

this is so important.

Learning in school is not enough. You must continue to teach yourself throughout your life. Study history, read myths, memorize poems, get acquainted with the greatest philosophers & writers. In an age when tech is cooking many brains, we need an army of autodidacts.

[The Anatomy of Melancholy, Briggs' Anatomy of Puck, The Folklore of Shakespeare, two books about strange London, The Mythic Journey, The Complete Essays of Montaigne]

Insane haul today at the library book sale - seven books for seven dollars ... the librarian told us they had been donated and the donor worried that the books were too niche to sell ... I've been searching for some of these for AGES 🤓

Rex Stout called her the greatest novelist of all time.

It’s adorable when guys dismiss Jane Austen as saccharine romantic fluff because I suspect none of her critics will write novels of such sharp comedy and keen understanding of human nature that they’re still being read by millions of people 250 years in the future.

Gonzo & Rizzo

If you’ve never read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, do yourself a favor and read it during the holidays. It’s one of the greatest books ever written, it takes less than two hours to read and once you finish, you can say you’ve read one book by Charles Dickens.

Whatever its merits, the internet has become a psychologically destructive force. You will be happier and healthier if you don’t spend excess amounts of time online. Stop scrolling. Water your garden. Read a book to your kids. You will not regret a life spent in this world.

Social media amplifies our worst tendencies: bloodlust, baseless speculation, the hunger for vengeance. We were not made to see people repeatedly murdered on camera. We were not meant to read every person's unfiltered opinions. It is corrosive to the soul.

amazingly, when I posted this on the other site, someone immediately tagged you

It’s feared that if bees are not kept abreast of the news, they’ll get offended and cease making honey. According to A Dictionary of English Folklore, “In some Yorkshire villages bees were formally invited to funerals.” Queen Elizabeth’s hives were informed of her death in 2022.

There’s a tradition in some European countries called “telling the bees,” in which bees are informed of notable events in the human world. In Oxford, when a hive’s owner dies, a member of the family will tap on the hive with a housekey and say, “Bees, bees, your master is dead.”

I grabbed it for a dollar in 2006 - insane how much higher the prices have risen since then

yes. in fact it will make them extremely cool

[images of Folklore Myths & Legends of Britain by Reader’s Digest]

This is one of the best single-volume collections of weird folklore ever written, and awakened my love of bogies, feasts, festivals, drowned cities and haunted castles at a young age. An essential book for any lover of legends and old tales.

I know it sounds mad but if you had regular exposure to trees and sunlight and started reading again for pleasure, it would heal you.

it's all anyone's talking about on twitter

The most alarming thing about the internet is how it kills our capacity for delight. People spend hours scrolling glass-eyed through content that brings only crumbs of amusement. Real joy is found in the real world: in reading, in starlight, in birdsong, in service to others.

If you’re someone who still reads for pleasure, you are a marvel. If you’re able to unplug from all the chaos of our entertainment culture and disappear into the warmth and solace of a book, that is a rare gift and I’m very glad to know you.

not reading books is what got us into this mess

just finished SPQR! And I quite enjoy Louise Penny.

If you’re someone who still reads for pleasure, you are a marvel. If you’re able to unplug from all the chaos of our entertainment culture and disappear into the warmth and solace of a book, that is a rare gift and I’m very glad to know you.

“The problem in the U. S. isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading … You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury; a world where no one reads books is no different from a world without books

Robin Williams saying "poetry. beauty. romance. love. these are what we stay alive for."

Students don’t need chromebooks and AI tutors, they need Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the Greek myths, they need the Arthurian Legends and the Arabian Nights, they need constant exposure to nature, fairytales, folklore, poetry and beauty.

People are reading AI-generated synopses of books and then claiming they read 100 books in a week. This is how the abolition of books began in Fahrenheit 451: classics were condensed into five-minute summaries for those too busy to do the reading. Later came the burnings.