Reading

For this last Bulletin, I’d like to talk about reading. The holidays are just around the corner, and it’s always a great opportunity to read those books you’ve been promising yourself to devour.

Perhaps you’re a lover of paper, you like to wander around bookshops and discover, at the turn of a beautiful cover, the next book into which you can eagerly throw yourself for a few days or even weeks. Unfortunately, you also travel a lot and don’t feel like loading up your suitcase with several books. So you may have been thinking of investing in an e-reader.

But when your books go digital, you’re not just saving a few grams or even a few kilos. You gain a few new possibilities. It’s these possibilities that I’d like to talk about today.

Do you need a book? Right now? Here it is. Don’t understand a word or phrase? The integrated dictionary or translation is at your fingertips. Need to find a particular passage? You’ll find it instantly by typing in a few key words. And, of course, you can annotate the book and highlight with your index finger all the passages you consider memorable.

But the day I discovered that these highlighted passages could be easily exported was a revelation. Of course, if I need to quote a passage, I can do so by simply copying and pasting, but there’s more. There’s Readwise. What does this app do? It collects everything you highlight and annotate, and each day offers you a customizable selection of these passages. Every day, Readwise brings back from the past those works that I read years ago and that my fragile memory had allowed to sink into the limbo of my brain.

Since then, the books I’ve read resurface daily. I find it easier to return to them. In fact, I’ve never been read so much!

I hope you have a wonderful, book-filled vacation.