At home and at work, I appreciate clever storage solutions and neat display ideas.
I fell hook, line, and sinker for that unlikely de-cluttering bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. What facts have you learned from fiction? of Speculation: “ These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.”) Then, of course, there’s always the Internet to fact-check the fiction.
(Another quote, from Jenny Offill’s marvelous Dept. Fortunately, I’ve acquired my learning from novels in addition to a formal education, but I find that more often than not, it’s the facts from novels that stick in my mind, and I can more easily recall a specific novel than a particular article. “ was random yet far-ranging, the sign that one has acquired one’s learning from novels, rather than an education.” Ask me to cite my sources, and I’m as likely to mention a Dick Francis mystery novel or a Cory Doctorow YA novel as I am to mention long-form journalism from a reputable source.Ībout two years ago, as I was immersed in Kate Atkinson’s mind-bendingly good Life After Life, I came across this sentence:
Or was it, perhaps, from a novel? Over a lifetime of reading, I’ve acquired many facts from fiction. Was it an article from The New Yorker or The Atlantic? Was it on Slate, Salon, or – please no – Buzzfeed? This is just to say – and you can keep your plums, William Carlos Williams – that where you get your information is of crucial importance, and that it can be very hard to remember. Much “information” is actually opinion – and then there is advertising or “sponsored posts,” and it’s enough to start calling the Information Age the Misinformation Age instead (sounds Orwellian, doesn’t it?). The Internet, unlike books, does not come with a neat copyright page it can be difficult to tell when something was written, let alone who by, and what that person’s affiliations and qualifications are. It used to be that a significant part of a librarian’s job was finding information now, much of it is sifting the good from the bad, the reliable from the slanted, biased, agenda-powered, and outright made-up.
Here, now, in the future – ever since 2010 it has seemed like the future – we are flooded with information, bombarded with it.
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