National Reading Month: 9 Great Things to Read in 9 Minutes

March 19, 2014 1:41 PM EDT

March is National Reading Month, but don’t worry. This article is not going to be about the big, blubbery virtues of Moby Dick or the nuances of Nicholas Nickleby. While reading “great books” is great, it can feel like a commitment that doesn’t jibe with modern life, fractured as it is into an unending barrage of tweets and screens and streams.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever make time for epic novels or that reading isn’t important. Reading is how we encounter and learn new words, those things we use to communicate and get jobs and woo lovers and understand basically everything. Luckily for the busy, distracted reader, not all great writing is long. And there are tools that will help new words stick in our brains that also fit into our device-centric lives.

“It’s important, especially for students, to know that vocabulary is something that is living, that is constantly all around them, that literacy doesn’t consist of a particular canon of books,” says Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com, which debuted an addictive word-learning app for iPhones this week. “You can take any text, whether it’s a movie script or the lyrics of a song, and pull out the vocab words.”

So in honor of National Reading Month, and in recognition of modern attention spans, here are nine examples of things that are not big, important books and can be read in nine minutes or less (though some are admittedly pushing the average word-per-minute rates). Along with each excerpt is a worthy vocab word with context from Vocabulary.com, which aims to explain words like a good teacher would.

1. A short story: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” by James Thurber, written in 1939 (and turned into a Ben Stiller movie in 2013), about a man with an imagination

“A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. “You miserable cur!” . . . ‘Puppy biscuit,’ said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. ‘He said “Puppy biscuit,”’ she said to her companion. ‘That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself.’”

bedlam (n.): a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion. The term bedlam comes from the name of a hospital in London, “Saint Mary of Bethlehem,” which was devoted to treating the mentally ill in the 1400s. Over time, the pronunciation of “Bethlehem” morphed into bedlam and the term came to be applied to any situation where pandemonium prevails.

2. Song lyrics: “Hurricane,” by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, a protest song about the imprisonment of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin’ that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

hurricane (n.): a severe tropical storm with high winds and heavy rain. When a hurricane comes through your town, you should board up the windows and stay inside. Hurricanes have sustained winds that rotate in a circle, which is why they are often referred to as cyclones.

3. A list of rules: The Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Cappelanus, contains this set of rules about love, dating to the 12th century

8. No one should be deprived of love without a valid reason.
9. No one can love who is not driven to do so by the power of love.
10. Love always departs from the dwelling place of avarice.
11. It is not proper to love one whom one would be ashamed to marry.
12. The true lover never desires the embraces of any save his lover.
13. Love rarely lasts when it is revealed.

avarice (n.): avarice is a fancy word for good old-fashioned greed. Do you want more and more money? Or cookies? Or anything? Then your heart is full of avarice. When people talk about greed, it’s clearly not a good thing, but avarice has an even worse flavor to it.

4. An essay: “The Peace The Bomb,” written by author James Agee at the end of World War II

Even as men saluted the greatest and most grimly Pyrrhic of victories in all the gratitude and good spirit they could muster, they recognized that the discovery which had done most to end the worst of wars might also, quite conceivably, end all wars–if only man could learn its control and use. The promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite.

pyrrhic (adj): Use the adjective pyrrhic to describe a victory that is won, but at too great a cost. The word pyrrhic comes from the Greek general, Pyrrhus, who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Asculum but lost so many troops that he couldn’t defeat Rome itself.

5. A children’s poem: “Sick,” by Shel Silverstein, chronicles a young lady’s attempt to get out of going to school, with a surprising ending

I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more–that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?

gash (n.): a gash is a deep cut, like a gash on your knee from a biking accident, or a gash in the earth caused by workers who are digging up a broken sewer. The noun gash describes a wound or cut, so it makes sense that as a verb, gash describes the act of making that wound or cut.

6. An adult’s poem: “Their Lonely Betters,” a poem by W.H. Auden from 1950, explains why people talk and plants do not

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

responsibility (n): responsibility is something you’re required to do as an upstanding member of a community. Responsibility comes from the Latin responsus, which means “to respond.” It can be another word for trustworthiness, and it can be used to describe the social force that motivates us to take on individual responsibilities.

7. Lessons: For years, Esquire has been asking great people what they have learned and summing up their wisdom, like a 2011 piece investigating the mind of George Clooney

Here’s the thing: We used to lead the world in making things. But we stopped making things. We don’t make anything anymore. I miss that. Hollywood still makes things. We still export a couple billion dollars’ worth of product overseas. Original, new product. Some people might not agree that it’s original or new, but basically it is. There aren’t a whole lot of industries that are exporting things right now — big time with big money. We spent about twenty years making money off of making money. And that’s a very dangerous place to exist.

export (v.): to export something is to move it from its current location to a different territory. The verb export comes from the Latin word exportare which means “to carry out” or “send away.” To export something is to move it across borders.

8. A commencement speech: Author David Foster Wallace, now deceased, gave a speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

prosperous (adj.): If you have a new car and some flashy new shoes, then you could be described as prosperous, meaning you have material success that seems like it will continue to grow. The adjective prosperous often describes a person or a person’s future, but it can apply to anything that’s experiencing growth and success. Prosperous derives from the Latin word prosperus, meaning “doing well.”

9. A children’s book: Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss lays out the somewhat brighter outlook for the future

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know. You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

dexterous (adj): If you’re dexterous, you’re good with your hands, but it can mean any skillful or clever physical movement. A kid’s dexterous ball handling and footwork can aid him on the soccer field. Dexterous can also be used to describe mental skill and agility — like the dexterous handling of an uncomfortable situation at work.

Or, perhaps, the dexterous handling leading a busy life and plugging in the little holes with great bits of reading.

Update: In addition to being an approachable dictionary and quiz machine, Vocabulary.com puts together lists of words to learn, based on everything from Don Draper lines in Mad Men to Lou Reed lyrics to historical documents. And now added to that is a list based on this very article.

This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. For the previous post, click here.

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