“Experienced readers could engage in consultation reading even without an index or a table of contents, given the predictable order in which topics were generally treated in various genres. For example, al-Juzajani, the biographer of the great medical scholar Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), reported on the reading habits of this autodidact: 'One of the remarkable things about the Master was that for the twenty-five years that I was his companion and servant, I did not once see him, when he came across a new book, examine it from beginning to end. Rather he would go directly to its difficult passages and intricate problems and look at what its author had to say about them.” ReadingTextbooksAvicenna Book:Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age Source: Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
“Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.” WritersAffairsArabicBeirutGrad StudentAvicennaAmerican University Book:Amy Falls Down Source: Amy Falls Down