June’s challenge starts with a book by Austrian author Stefan Zweig – The Post-Office Girl. first degree We English-speaking readers must access The Post-Office Girl in translation. I’ve recently added another translated work to my TBR list, Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel by Shuang-zi Yang, translated by Lin King, 2026 winner of the International Booker Prize. […]
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Do We Think Too Much About the Future? “For most of history, people didn’t try predicting it. Maybe that was wise.” One feature of life story psychology is the concept of life review, a tendency to think about the future in terms of what our lives mean and what we want to leave as a legacy.
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What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? Kelsey Rexroat, a writer and editor from San Francisco, talked with people who read 100 or more books in a year, “people for whom reading is not a hobby so much as a way of moving through the world.” She identifies five patterns among such “super-readers.” I found
The Summer Reading Guide If you’re still drawing up your summer reading plan, The Atlantic has 25 recommendations for books in the following categories: What Close Reading Can Reveal About an Author’s Intentions I was always taught that we cannot know what an author intended to do; we can only see what an author has
In Praise of Chick Lit: The Genre’s All-Stars Talk to Vanity Fair “As The Devil Wears Prada 2 dominates, it’s time to give these best-selling, much-maligned books about single women in the big city their due—with help from Plum Sykes and Jennifer Weiner.” I don’t like the term chick lit; nonetheless, I’ll have to live
This month’s stating point is Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent. In this novel we get to know Sybil Van Antwerp from her 73rd birthday until her death about 10 years later. first degree One of the people to whom Sybil writes is author Joan Didion. In an example of synchronicity, the book I read
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A man awakens with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he’s here. He’s being ministered to by robotic arms apparently controlled by a computer that keeps asking, “What is your name?” As flashes of memory play out in his mind, he struggles to remember. He asks questions, but all the
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Reading to young kids improves their social skills − and a new study shows it doesn’t matter whether parents stop to ask questions Interested in developing empathy and creativity in her school-age children, Erin Clabough, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, compared two methods of reading aloud to children: (1) reading straight
We’re All Reading Wrong “To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.” Journalist Alexandra Moe informs us “Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud.” She continues: “To reap the full benefits of
Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read “When life gets really hectic, sitting quietly with a book can feel like an impossible luxury,” writes Bekah Waalkes. “What works best for me, though, is choosing just the right book.” Here she suggests some books “representing varied genres” that you might “actually want to
