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Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️

@SketchesbyBoze249k followers

books, beauty, folklore, myth • @wren_and_paper & Dickens fan • gets dressed up like a pillow so she's always in bed •

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Posts 99 posts
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1Dec 21, '24Last night I met up with my favorite English teacher, a lifelong friend who teaches both high school and college courses. In thirty-five years of teaching, she has never been more 40×12.4M159k8.9k20k
2Nov 11, '25I'm glad the villain of the new Toy Story is a child's tablet. I hope the film conveys how screens eat up a child's hobbies, interests, literacy, ability to function socially. I ho38×11.8M447k60k22k
3Jul 31, '23Agatha Christie had a habit of studying things so intensely that she accidentally became an expert. One time she asked an archeologist, “Who is the world’s leading authority on Mes28.3×8.8M153k10k9.6k
4Nov 27, '23call me controversial but I think we need to go back to having beds in nooks28×8.7M216k22k11k
5Oct 3, '24The secret to getting kids reading is the same thing that worked in the nineties. Reading Rainbow. Free pizzas. Shakespeare rom-coms. A million Jane Austen adaptations. Movies wher21.4×6.6M64k7.2k3.2k
6Aug 16, '25People are reading AI-generated synopses of books and then claiming they read 100 books in a book. This is how the abolition of books began in Fahrenheit 451: classics were condens18.5×5.7M269k33k12k
7Mar 2, '23“why is everyone suddenly being diagnosed with autism—” because in the past no one knew about autism, and we were literally thought to be faerie children who had snuck into human h18.4×5.7M63k6k1.9k
8Nov 21, '24Seriously: I lived in a religious community that decided to collectively punish me by pretending I didn't exist for almost a year. And one night a cashier brought me a pair of snow18.1×5.6M114k4.9k8.4k
9Sep 25, '24film studios will say “we are committed to diverse casting” and then cast Jacob Elordi to play Heathcliff, one of the more famous people of color in literature, whose race is cruci17.7×5.5M62k3.8k2.3k
10May 21, '25In Fahrenheit 451, the abolition of reading began with tech companies simplifying books into summaries that you could read in five minutes. Because people no longer engaged with th17×5.3M191k35k12k
11Aug 2, '25If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thi14.7×4.5M145k24k4.5k
12Nov 26, '24I'm so serious, if you stop using your creativity, imagination and thinking abilities you will LOSE them. Millions of people willingly giving up their intellects, the very thing th13.5×4.2M154k28k11k
13Jun 9, '25We just hosted a dinner party, and someone said, “I wonder where the word raspberry comes from?” I leapt up, shouted, “LET’S FIND OUT” and ran to my study, emerging a moment later 12.9×4M51k3.2k4.6k
14Dec 20, '24people who say “why do we need [fine arts, humanities degrees, mid-budget films] when they don’t make a ton of money?” are insufferable. why do we need chrysanthemums? why do we ne12.2×3.8M95k12k4.3k
15May 28, '25Ray Bradbury; this is how you rebuild an attention span11.3×3.5M67k8k26k
16Jul 29, '25A key point in Fahrenheit 451 is that books were banned because they made people depressed and uncomfortable. The novel's protagonist, Montag, is taken into custody after he reads 10.4×3.2M142k18k12k
17Mar 11, '25“The Great Gatsby is dated and irrelevant.” You’re right. What could a novel about a generation of young men becoming hustlers and white nationalists because they were sold a lie a9.9×3.1M116k12k6k
18Mar 16, '25not to defend the robber barons but Andrew Carnegie, the richest man of his era, gave away 90 percent of his wealth and funded the building of 2,811 libraries, and I’m afraid the c9.9×3.1M138k11k5.1k
19Oct 5, '25We went from “what good are the humanities?” to “suddenly, no one can read” in about a year, and it's no coincidence that we're suddenly awash in misinformation and lack of critica9.8×3M59k14k4.4k
20Oct 21, '24I see people saying “why should we give free lunches to schoolchildren?” and I think some folks truly have no idea what it’s like to grow up in poverty, never knowing where your ne9.7×3M75k8k2.7k
21Sep 13, '23People say, “Why were there no autistic people in the past?” but then you read biographies of famous scientists or poets who were deemed “eccentric” and “struggled socially” and “t9.4×2.9M92k8.9k2.9k
22Aug 31, '24you will never catch me dying in a cave or whilst climbing Mount Everest. you know who hasn’t suffered a gruesome death far in the caverns below ground? me, because I’m in my jim-j9.0×2.8M71k4.5k943
23Jul 8, '24In the novel Fahrenheit 451, the abolition of reading began with tech companies simplifying books into summaries that you could read in five minutes. Because people no longer engag8.7×2.7M98k21k6.3k
24May 13, '25James Baldwin8.6×2.7M49k7k5.8k
25Feb 5, '25I miss the days when very rich people used their money to fund libraries, public art and philanthropic endeavors rather than launching slow-motion coups against the federal governm8.3×2.6M172k20k2.7k
26Jun 21, '24People ask “how did the Victorians come up with crazy stories like Dracula and Dorian Gray” and then you realize literally everything was poison. The wallpaper was coated in arseni8.3×2.6M106k8.4k5.8k
27Oct 2, '23my freshman year of high school, the star football player died in a tragic accident and I kept seeing his ghost around campus and the ghost would say hello to me, and not until yea7.9×2.5M76k3.4k1.5k
28Oct 8, '25I find it bleak that ChatGPT now has more users than Wikipedia. Many people would rather be spoon-fed information by a machine than read and research for themselves. Tech isn't jus7.7×2.4M113k20k3.4k
29May 6, '23everyone says “you’ll settle down and get married and lose your enthusiasm for your special interests” but *what if* you marry someone who’s equally deranged and your enthusiasms D7.0×2.2M59k6.9k1.7k
30Jul 4, '25In George Orwell's 1984, all human art has been abolished but machines churn out automated novels and pop music. Big Brother keeps the population in check by preventing potentially6.9×2.1M100k20k3.8k
31Jan 6, '25Seems important that in Fahrenheit 451, books were still “available” in single-paragraph summaries—“read Hamlet in five minutes!”—but the books themselves had been banned for being6.7×2.1M84k13k4.7k
32Nov 18, '24unironically, take an interest in things. visit art galleries, hit up the library and discover-browse. read widely. learn new languages, new words. watch old films. the world is a 6.6×2M80k13k11k
33Dec 31, '22my only resolution for the new year is to become her6.1×1.9M59k7.5k685
34Jun 18, '25I find this sinister, because euphemisms like “unalived” are part of a broader dumbing down of language. Orwell warned about “narrowing the range of thought” in 1984: “We shall mak6.0×1.9M86k13k3.9k
35Jun 18, '25As I've been saying, if you willingly relinquish your mental abilities, you will lose them. The fact that millions of people seem eager to give up their intellects, to be freed fro6.0×1.8M57k15k7.4k
36Feb 19, '25Not just the highly educated. Welsh miners formed study groups to read Austen and Dickens. Scottish shepherds built lending libraries. Watchmakers & cabinetmakers taught themse5.8×1.8M56k8.2k6.4k
37Dec 14, '23in college I had two classics professors who were married and would speak to each other in ancient Greek, and I think the secret of a lasting relationship is being joyously unhinge5.8×1.8M65k6.2k3.3k
38Mar 23, '25No. Stop pathologizing benign behavior, stop shaming things that are objectively good. You grew up reading because you enjoyed it, because it gave you pleasure. Your life was enric5.6×1.7M90k9.3k1.9k
39Oct 25, '25If you're using AI to write essays, something everyone was capable of doing until the day before yesterday, I think less of you as a person. Surrendering your mental abilities to a5.5×1.7M84k14k2.2k
40Oct 29, '25A huge factor in the collapse of our collective mental health is the decline in reading for pleasure. Reading lessens loneliness, builds community, sharpens the intellect. It bring5.0×1.5M70k9.8k4k
41Feb 14, '25I can’t stress enough how much AI is ruining the internet. Pinterest is un-usable, Google image searches are overrun with misleading slop. It’s estimated that there are now more bo4.9×1.5M78k12k2.6k
42Oct 1, '25Saw 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 wi4.9×1.5M124k26k3.7k
43Aug 5, '25A great example of how not reading yields historical illiteracy. The Romans were a famously multiethnic people who, in 212 AD, granted citizenship to everyone within their domains.4.9×1.5M48k4.5k3.1k
44Mar 27, '25insane to me that in just two years we’ve effectively destroyed the internet for the sake of a product whose only discernible use is helping students cheat on their homework.4.8×1.5M62k5.1k1.6k
45Feb 16, '25It’s crazy in retrospect how confident and hopeful my generation (millennials) were fifteen years ago. We were making ground-breaking music. We were going to end racism forever. Th4.8×1.5M62k4.5k3.7k
46Jan 7, '212016: it’s only four years, how bad can it get 2021: are the armed insurrectionists storming the Capitol aware that there is a plague ravaging the land4.7×0212k41k2.3k
47Feb 7, '25The part of George Orwell’s 1984 that everyone forgets is how the music and publishing industries have been replaced by a machine that spits out songs and bad novels “without any h4.6×1.4M103k15k6.6k
48Nov 10, '24someone accidentally started a silent book club and I truly believe this could heal our country.4.6×1.4M61k6.8k4.1k
49Dec 11, '24people say “you have to judge slaveholders by the morality of their own time, no one knew it was wrong” and then you read about some Quaker named, like, Mr. End-Slavery-Now who was4.1×1.3M74k6.2k4.3k
50Mar 5, '25Reading about the insane numbers of books that ordinary working people used to read a hundred years ago feels like seeing pictures of the Pacific Ocean back when it teemed with wha4.0×1.3M50k3.3k5k
51Jan 9, '25you should be able to opt out of AI the way you can unsubscribe from emails. I'm tired of seeing it shoved into every damn site and app3.8×1.2M109k11k820
52Oct 30, '25AI companies are posting stealth ads encouraging students not to major in the humanities. More proof, if you need it, that anti-humanities propaganda is being pushed by the tech wo3.7×1.1M73k14k3.4k
53Jan 16, '25the internet was better when it was on a computer in your house and didn't consume our whole lives. time passed more slowly before there were endless distractions. you had space to3.6×1.1M49k8.4k1.9k
54Oct 19, '25People love to criticize reading in public as performative but I can't stress enough how much it would improve our collective mental health if we all carried books wherever we went3.6×1.1M54k7.1k1.5k
55Oct 26, '25People are only just learning that “peter” is a verb. Yesterday someone was branded pretentious for using the word “foliage.” The dangerous thing about not reading is that it limit3.5×1.1M63k7.3k1.9k
56Dec 7, '24highly recommend not using ChatGPT at all, since the servers that power it use more electricity than major cities, it's been known to recommend eating glue and smoking multiple cig3.4×1.1M49k8.8k1.2k
57Sep 13, '24whenever a man says “childless women contribute nothing to society,” the ghost of the famously unmarried Jane Austen rises and says, “you are such a disagreeable man that it would 3.2×996k64k9.8k2.9k
58Dec 26, '18you want some good news from 2018? I bet you do • book sales are up this year over last year • sales of physical books have grown every year since 2013 • indie bookstores have incr3.2×0135k31k455
59May 7, '25in retrospect maybe it was a mistake to tell young people that reading, the arts, the humanities weren’t important and that “learning to code” was sufficient for a good life.3.2×982k76k8.4k2.5k
60Sep 13, '21stop glamorizing “the Grind” and start glamorizing whatever this is3.1×0142k24k1.9k
61Jun 11, '19telling people you’re single: • “you’ll find someone” • “have you tried tinder” saying “many have tried to date me and all have failed”: • mystical • empowering • sword-in-the-ston3.1×0129k30k1.8k
62Jun 3, '25People think I'm kidding when I say there is a fascist agenda behind the promotion of AI. These devices are designed to kill literacy. We grew up in one of those rare periods of hi3.1×947k51k12k2.6k
63Mar 21, '25St. Andrew’s University in Scotland has a centuries-old legend about a student who is struggling to write an essay, when the actual devil appears and hands him the essay fully writ2.9×893k57k3.8k3.1k
64Nov 14, '24saw someone say that The Hobbit is too difficult a book for teenagers, and I really think part of the problem is adults with such low expectations that they think kids can’t handle2.9×887k43k3.6k769
65Sep 11, '20my girlfriend regularly tells me “if free public libraries didn’t already exist and someone tried to invent them, they would be condemned as a socialist plot” and I think about tha2.8×0122k26k1.3k
66Jul 26, '22kids today are like “so what did y’all do before the internet? did you just not know anything?” and the answer is yes. you would ask your aunt Marge a question, she’d give you the 2.7×0141k14k1.4k
67May 17, '25The contempt that these folks have for the poor and under-privileged is galling. Yes, it is ethical to buy used books. Yes, it is ethical to borrow books from the library. Not ever2.7×843k56k8.9k1.3k
68Sep 17, '22life is full of horrors but sometimes you see a baby hummingbird sipping from a raspberry2.6×0137k11k2.1k
69Oct 22, '24it’s crazy to me that in just two years we’ve effectively destroyed the internet for the sake of a product whose only discernible use is helping students cheat on their homework.2.5×791k51k4.5k1k
70May 23, '19now I'm falling asleep and she's calling a crab and they're having a smoke and he's wearing a hat2.5×0100k27k916
71Mar 3, '21no one dresses better than the starling in her cloak of many stars2.4×0107k20k3.2k
72Aug 18, '22hoping to encourage tourism, Scotland placed a couple of Shetland ponies in sweaters and it might be the best promotional campaign ever2.4×0122k13k2.4k
73Sep 4, '18we love Edgar Allan Poe because he portrays universal human emotions like loss, grief, unrequited love, burying your enemy alive in the cellar and being scared out of your mind by 2.4×095k27k689
74Aug 6, '21I don’t want to “have a mortgage” or “pay utilities” I want to be a rose finch2.0×095k16k1.6k
75May 17, '19me at 16: I want to see my face on TV! I want to be a legend! me now: I want to be a Gnome with a tiny shop in the woods where I cobble shoes. I’ll ride a goose to work and sip rai2.0×086k19k825
76Apr 27, '21this is the kind of relationship I aspire to, this is peak love1.8×085k14k1.3k
77Mar 10, '22stop shaming people for reading kids’ books. adult books are about sad people having affairs while kids’ books have a magic tree house or a worm driving an apple. you tell me who’s1.7×078k13k1.1k
78Oct 24, '21what I love in every old-timey photo of women dressing up their cats is how peeved the cats look1.7×080k13k1.3k
79Apr 23, '22whenever I'm depressed I remember the penguin in a Penguin Books sweater1.7×089k8.6k1.4k
80Jul 21, '21Dolly Parton didn't spend her millions on vanity space travel, she's spent it putting 150 million books in the hands of children and honestly, more people should be like Dolly.1.6×077k13k302
81Aug 31, '19boomers: millennials are *immoral* and only think about themselves millennials: *sweating* would fleeing into the woods lower my environmental impact? am I supporting CEOs who are 1.6×075k14k446
82Aug 13, '19sex on your wedding night: • awkward • disappointing un-tying the ribbon around your neck, causing your head to fall to the floor: • unexpected • Goth as hell • honeymoon prank for1.6×074k14k566
83Apr 24, '18Stephen King: what if there was an *evil* clown Mary Shelley: what if a corpse came to life Edgar Allan Poe: oh no a bird!!!1.6×067k15k228
84Aug 14, '21I don’t want to get a “real job” I want whatever she has1.6×083k7.3k497
85Dec 15, '21did I accomplish my goals for this year? no. but did I look after my physical and mental health? not at all. but did I maintain a proper diet and sleep schedule? listen,1.5×062k15k954
86Mar 22, '22sorry I haven’t texted you back in a month. the old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born. now is the time of monsters.1.4×063k12k1.5k
87Aug 16, '18ROALD DAHL: so, this book is about a chocolate factory— PUBLISHER: and it’s magic? DAHL: no, it murders children PUBLISHER: … DAHL: just *slaughters* these kids,1.4×064k12k249
88Jul 10, '21everyone talks about Leo's performance in Romeo + Juliet but y'all slept on Harold Perrinau's Mercutio1.3×059k9.3k1k
89Aug 30, '18“women are ruining sci-fi!!!” first of all, your genre was *invented* by a 17-year-old girl, she made love on her mother’s grave and kept her late husband’s calcified heart on her 1.3×055k14k508
90Feb 27, '22it's the end of the week and maybe you need to see a bitty otter bowl1.2×059k7.9k874
91Oct 13, '19saying you were a c-section baby: • boring • conversation-killer saying “I was from my mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”: • dramatic • metal as hell • can defeat Macbeth in single com1.2×053k11k479
92Apr 25, '21who wore it better1.2×061k6.7k988
93Oct 10, '22stop glamorizing being a go-getter and start glamorizing a bed nook1.1×056k5.7k2k
94Nov 26, '19I’ve never been owned harder than the time I texted my best friend, “having a crisis because I used to think I was in Gryffindor but I might be a Hufflepuff??” and he texted back “1.1×062k4.6k339
95Feb 28, '21“hot girl summer” is canceled, get ready for “old lady spring”: we’re staying indoors watching Bake-Off, wearing increasingly colorful cardigans, and solving the occasional crime i1.1×049k8.9k420
96Jan 26, '21merry large boulder the size of a small boulder day to all who celebrate1.0×046k8.3k311
97May 2, '21when I say I want improved public transportation, this is what I have in mind1.0×051k5.9k562
98Oct 4, '22people say “Lord of the Rings has gone woke” but *Tolkien himself* had a woman secretly dressed in battle array whip off her helmet and cry “No living man am I!” just before slayin0.8×040k3.2k493
99Oct 11I would rather be “performative” than illiterate.0.2×68k8.2k1k150

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