Just in case you missed the day’s hottest literary topic. . .
Archive for the ‘Book News’ Category
Amazon Buys Goodreads
Friday, March 29th, 2013
‘The Feminine Mystique,’ Reassessed after 50 Years – NYTimes.com
Tuesday, February 19th, 2013‘The Feminine Mystique,’ Reassessed after 50 Years – NYTimes.com.
Here, on the anniversary of its publication, is yet another article about The Feminine Mystique.
Monday Miscellany
Monday, February 11th, 2013Feeling Bookish?
The big book event of the last week was the arrival of Bookish. “We know books,” the site declares. Its announced purpose is to allow readers to search, discover, read, and share information about books. Created by publishing giants Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, the site will work with USA Today to integrate its content into the paper’s book coverage.
I haven’t had much time to check out the site myself, but others in the publishing world have. Here’s some coverage:
- Bookish Goes Live: Publishers Weekly’s coverage of the launch.
- Review of Bookish.com: Book Riot’s Jeff O’Neal concludes “Bookish is an attractive online bookstore with an above-average recommendation engine and the promise of compelling supporting editorial content. I think many book buyers will prefer the experience of browsing Bookish to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but I’m not sure that is enough to change readers’ buying habits.”
- Bookish, New Book Recommendation Website, Gets Mixed Reviews : HuffPost Books aggregates the critical response
Have you registered as a Bookish user? What do you think of the new site?
English literature’s 50 key moments from Marlowe to JK Rowling
In other book-related news, U. K. newspaper The Guardian announced its list of “the hinge points in the evolution of Anglo-American literature.” The list covers the death of Christopher Marlowe (1593) through JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997).
The list concludes:
This catalogue, in conclusion, is highly partisan and impressionistic. It makes no claim to be comprehensive (how could it?). Rather, it aims to stimulate a discussion about the turning-points in the world of books and letters from the King James Bible to the present day.
Over to you.
Read on to see how two writers have picked up the gauntlet.
50 Great Women Writers — how many have you heard of?
Dear Guardian newspaper,
We note that your books editor, Robert McCrum, has published a ‘partisan list’ of 50 turning points in literature, and that comments have remarked on the low numbers of women (7).
To begin redressing the gender balance, here is another list – even more partisan, in that it consists entirely of influential women writers. (McCrum’s original choices are in red.)
Here are those 50 great, pioneering women.
Yours,
Kathleen Taylor (science writer) & Gillian Wright (senior lecturer in English literature)
Their list covers Julian of Norwich: Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393; thought to be the first book written in English by a woman) through Hilary Mantel: Bring up the Bodies (2012; women can win prizes. Even the Booker. Twice.).
There are only seven entries common to both lists, which Taylor and Wright highlight in red.
The Author Himself Was a Cat in the Hat
All over Dr. Seuss’s beloved children’s books, his characters sport distinctive, colorful headwear — unless they are the kinds of creatures that have it sprouting naturally from their heads in tufted, multitiered and majestically flowing formations.
So it’s no surprise that the real Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, was a hat lover himself. He collected hundreds of them, plumed, beribboned and spiked, and kept them in a closet hidden behind a bookcase in his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He incorporated them into his personal paintings, his advertising work and his books. He even insisted that guests to his home don the most elaborate ones he could find.
To keep the Seuss brand current, the Dr. Seuss publisher, Random House Children’s Books, has mounted an exhibit that will for the first time display some of his hats in public:
The show, timed to the 75th anniversary of his book “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” will open Monday at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and then travel to 15 other locations over the course of the year.
What really made Mary Ingalls go blind?
Dr. Beth Tarini has finished a project that began 10 years ago, when she was a medical student:
“I was in my pediatric rotation, and we were talking about scarlet fever,” says Tarini. She remembers commenting that scarlet fever can make you go blind. “The professor said, ‘No …,’ and I said, ‘But Mary Ingalls went blind!’ … So I got on a detective mission of sorts.”
Now an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, Tarini and coauthors have published an article in the journal Pediatrics claiming that not scarlet fever, but viral meningoencephalitis, an inflammatory disease that attacks the brain, caused Mary Ingalls’s blindness.
Besides settling a 10-year score with a med school professor, Tarini says the purpose of the paper is to remind physicians that their perception of a disease is often very different from their patients’ perception. Even today, Tarini says, if she tells parents their child has scarlet fever, they get really worried: “They look aghast! And in my head, I’m thinking, scarlet fever today is no different than strep throat with a rash. But they say, ‘Oh, scarlet fever! That’s deadly!’ And I’m like, it’s the 21st century!’”
Prison and Libraries: Public Service Inside and Out
Library Journal reports on how libraries are moving to serve the 1.6 million people in federal or state prisons in 2011 (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics):
What is changing is a growing realization that more public, prison, and jail libraries can better identify and serve the often significant needs of inmates or those prisoners who are returning to their communities. Not only are some libraries providing books, they are providing innovative programs and services, helping inmates and returnees to learn about work and employment opportunities, the arts (see sidebar, “Arts on the Inside“), and to develop job-seeking skills.
Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman Confirmed To Reteam For ‘Before I Go To Sleep’
Monday, February 4th, 2013Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman Confirmed To Reteam For ‘Before I Go To Sleep’.
I’m excited to hear about this film, based on quite a suspenseful novel. And Colin Firth. . . .
The film is expected to appear in 2014.
Monday Miscellany
Monday, January 21st, 2013Making Appointments With (Fictional) Doctors
A fictional M.D. will not reduce your fever, but she or he might reduce your boredom. That’s because many medical protagonists — whether general practitioners or something else — are quite interesting. They’re often not liberal arts types, but, heck, non-liberal arts types can be compelling characters, too.
Also of interest is seeing how fictional physicians interact with fictional patients, and how these doctors manage their fictional personal lives while working long hours. Plus we can’t help comparing literature’s doctors to our own doctors. Are these made-up medical people as compassionate and dedicated, or as egotistic and mercenary, or as competent or not-so-competent as the real-life medical people we visit?
Read what Dave Astor has to say about doctors in fiction, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to John Grisham’s The Client.
Romance that never loses its sparkle: The world’s most influential novel ever
BBC 1995 Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice
It gave us Colin Firth in a clinging, wet shirt and inspired Bridget Jones to sing “I’m Every Woman”. Jane Austen’s “own darling child”, or Pride and Prejudice as it’s known to you and me, is a brand all of its own. It has inspired more spin-offs than almost any other book in history, and has ballooned into a multi-million-pound industry. Pretty impressive, considering it turns 200 years old this month.
As enthusiasts, academics, authors and film-makers across the globe celebrate the bicentenary of the novel’s publication in the next few weeks, experts suggest “cult Austen” is only going to get bigger. Its market, they say – which until now has consisted largely of Britain, the US and Australia – is expanding. China, India and Russia are starting to swot up on all things Austen. Visitors are flocking to visit her home, Chawton in Hampshire, to read the sequels and travel to the locations where adaptations of her works were filmed.
Notes on all kinds of artistic endeavors inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
Fact of fiction: How reading the classics gives the brain a boost
Researchers at Liverpool University believe that reading classic works of literature, particularly Shakespeare, “had a beneficial effect on the mind, by catching the reader’s attention and triggering moments of self-reflection.”
Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read pieces by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, TS Eliot and others. They then “translated” the texts into more “straightforward”, modern language and again monitored the readers’ brains as they read the words. Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the more pedestrian versions.
Scientists were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word and noticed how it “lit up” as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure. This “lighting up” of the mind lasted longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear and encouraging further reading.
The classics also produced self-appraisal in readers:
The research also found that poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read.
One aspect of the research compared the reactions in volunteers’ brains when reading the work of, among others, Wordsworth, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliot, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and when reading paraphrases of the poetic passages. Reading of the original passages
caused a greater degree of brain activity, lighting up not only the left part of the brain concerned with language, but also the right hemisphere that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion.
Activity is this area of the brain suggests that the poetry triggers “reappraisal mechanisms” causing the reader to reflect and rethink their own experiences. “Poetry is not just a matter of style. It is a matter of deep versions of experience that add the emotional and biographical to the cognitive,” said Prof [Philip] Davis [an English professor who worked on the study].
“The next phase of the research is looking at the extent to which poetry can affect psychology and provide therapeutic benefit.”
Five Movies Coming Out In 2013 That Are Based On Books
Freelance writer and photographer Kristina Pino provides a heads-up on some upcoming films. “This list isn’t about the likes of Ender’s Game, Hunger Games, Carrie, The Great Gatsby, The Host, and others. It’s about the ‘little guys.’”
Read why she recommends these films:
- Warm Bodies
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- Beautiful Creatures
- I, Frankenstein
- Epic
Meet Babies Grey and Anastasia: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ inspires baby names
Call it the Fifty Shades bump — literally. BabyCenter has released their yearly list of most popular baby names and — shocker! — the Class of 2030 will be seeing a lot more Anastasias and Greys. Wait, Greys? Yes, readers. When bestowing a Fifty Shades-inspired moniker on their child, parents chose not Christian, but Grey. The name saw a 20 percent jump from last year. On the girls’ side of things, Anastasia rose ten percent, while Ana climbed 35 spots.
Movies Are Literature Too
And for snooty readers who think the book is always better than the movie, Christina Oppold has some news:
Sometimes we take our lives as readers too seriously. Even if we flit between the highbrow and fluffy beach read, it is easy to think of books as somehow being superior to movies. But storytelling is all connected. From the camp fire to the Blue Ray DVD, from stone tablets to digital ink; what thrills the balletomane bores the cinephile. Each new medium follows on the heels of what came before; it breathes new life in to sharing our stories and each is belittled by the supporters of what came before.
We read not for the sake of the book as a physical object but for the stories within that move us. Embrace the story no matter how it was conveyed to you.
Monday Miscellany
Monday, January 7th, 2013Happy New Year! And welcome back.
Read ahead for 2013
Jane Sullivan of Australia’s The Age clues us in on books (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) to be published this year.
Announcing the 2013 Tournament of Books
To add to your March madness:
The ToB is an annual springtime event here at the Morning News, where 16 of the year’s best works of fiction enter a March Madness-style battle royale. Today we’re announcing the judges and final books for the 2013 competition as well as the long list of books from which the contenders were selected.
. . .
If you’re new to the tournament, here’s how it works: Each weekday in March, two works of fiction from 2012 go head to head, with one of our judges deciding—with elaborate explanation—to advance one title into the next bracket. At the end of the month, the winner of the tournament is blessed with the Rooster, our prize named after David Sedaris’s brother (because why not). Along the way, each judge reveals his or her biases and interests, any connections they have to the participating authors, and, most importantly, how they decided between the two books. Then our ToB Chairmen, authors Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, weigh in with commentary, and finally leave it up to you, the readers, to add your own passionate thoughts and rebukes to the mix.
Famous Foils in Literature
“Foil” is a literary term to present a character in contrast with another with an aim to project it against a backdrop of opposite traits. The word “foil” was taken from the practice of displaying gems with a backing of foil to project their brilliance. Foil is a literary device to project a character by comparing it with another character similar in some essential traits but contrasting immensely in others. It is usually created to project the protagonist, the main character. The foil may or may not be a major character in a story, but it has something in common with the protagonist, and this diverts the attention of the reader or audience to the protagonist. A foil is like complementary colors which are located on the opposite sides of the color wheel, yet they need one another for their best to come out.
The Little House books as feminist classics
Nobody knows what feminism is any more, but it isn’t just about equal pay and abortion rights. It’s about appreciating femaleness for femaleness’s sake. Wilder was right wing, religious, practically silent as a writer until her 65th year. What pulls these books of hers, unwittingly or not, on to a feminist level derives from her innate rebelliousness, hinted at in the fictional Laura’s moments of indignation, sisterly rivalry and daredevil escapades. Wilder boldly took the American dream and 18th-century individualism to include herself, and wrote without apology about the daily lives of women and girls.
You may never look at these beloved books in quite the same way again.
Digital books leave a reader cold
Or they at least leave Kathleen Parker cold. And here’s her reason:
Paper, because it is real, provides an organic connection to our natural world: The tree from whence the paper came; the sun, water and soil that nourished the tree. By contrast, a digital device is alien, man-made, hard and cold to human flesh.
Are you convinced?
My 5 favorite health/medicine books of 2012
Dr. Suzanne Koven has recommendations for:
works of literature relating to health and medicine published in 2012. This genre is ever-growing, with new memoirs, literary nonfiction, and even novels and poetry collections added each year.
The 10 Best Narrators in Literature
The first-person narrator descends from the ancient storyteller unspooling his tale around the fire for the delight and edification of his people. But on the page, two things transform him. One, we readers can ask “Who is this speaker? Why is he telling us this story, and what isn’t he telling us?” Two, he can go on as long as he wants. The first case invents the so-called Unreliable Narrator, the second gives rise to what I like to call the World Swallower.
Read Oppen Porter’s choices as the best examples of these two types of first-person narrator.
Monday Miscellany
Monday, October 29th, 2012Today’s links.
The Most Dysfunctional Families in Literature
Neuroses run rampant across three generations of the Middlestein family in Jami Attenberg’s sublime new novel, The Middlesteins.
See why Attenberg includes the families from the following books on her list:
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
- Townie by Andre Dubus, III
- Arcadia by Lauren Groff’
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Medical Problems of 4 Great Writers
John J. Ross’s Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: The Medical Lives of Great Writers is everything you need to know about the afflictions of history’s greatest writers. Ross (a doctor and writer) outlines a few of the maladies of the authors we love.
- The Brontës
- William Butler Yeats
- James Joyce
- George Orwell
How to believe in yourself—even if you sometimes don’t
Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2007 novel Middlesex won the Pulitizer Prize and was a favorite read at my book group. But Eugenides says that the writing of the novel did not always go smoothly. In 1999 he moved to Berlin with his wife and daughter, and his unfinished manuscript. The change of scenery helped for a while, but then the anxiety symptoms—chest constriction, irritability, paranoia—returned.
And then one night he had a dream:
All that happened in the dream was that an owl, descended out of nowhere, seized me in its talons and blew into my mouth a single breath tasting of blood. That’s it. The dream lasted no more than four or five seconds. But it was one of those dreams that seems somehow more real than a typical dream, as if it were playing out at a level just below my conscious mind, or as if it originated not from my mind at all but from a source outside of me.
The owl, by the way, was gigantic. And not particularly realistic. In fact, the bird was stylized in the manner of a Klimt, with lozenges of color running up and down its wings and over its breast, and a large helmeted ceremonial head. Its eyes were fierce, omnipotent, bright yellow. It fixed these eyes on mine. When the owl lowered its beak to my lips, I opened my mouth. And then the owl exhaled one long forceful breath. With a whooshing sound, my lungs inflated. This inspiration had a taste: the mineral, meaty flavor of a predatory diet.
I awoke from this dream feeling that a message had been delivered to me. The great Owl in the Sky had taken a personal interest in me and my book. The owl had come to give me the power to write it.
Ten years later, having moved back to New Jersey, Eugenides was struggling to finish the manuscript of his recent novel The Marriage Plot. And then one night, outside his window, he heard—you guessed it, an owl. The owl continued to return until Eugenides had finished the manuscript, then vanished.
What matters is that the experience—both of my dream owl and the living one outside my window—arrived at the point I needed it, and helped me persevere.
In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That’s what inspiration is. You don’t get it from the gods. You make it. The owl at my window was just a bird, after all, trying to get through the winter. The owl in my dream was my own creation. It was me, breathing into myself, in order to breathe out again in a flow of words.
Eowyn Ivey’s Top 50 Books
What is it about lists of books that are so enticing? Can you list your top 50 favorites? Hans Weyandt, of Micawber’s Books in St. Paul, MN, challenged indie booksellers from all over the country to list theirs and posted them to the store’s blog, Mr. Micawber Enters The Internets (read his inaugural list and introduction to the project here). The series has gotten a lot of attention, and Weyandt recently compiled the lists and had them published in Read This!: Handpicked Favorites from America’s Indie Bookstores, with an introduction by Ann Patchett.
Given here is the list submitted by Eowyn Ivey, owner of Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, and author of the novel The Snow Child.
I’ve never even tried to compile a list of my 50 all-time favorite books. The closest I’ve come is my annual list of best books read that year.
How about you? Do you have a list of all-time favorites? Let us know in the comments what’s on—or would be on—your list. If we all start now, we might finish before the new year.
Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits
Pew Internet and American Life Project reports some good news on the status of reading by young people between the ages of 16 and 29:
More than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year, and six in ten used their local public library. At the youngest end of the spectrum, high schoolers in their late teens (ages 16-17) and college-aged young adults (ages 18-24) are especially likely to have read a book or used the library in the past 12 months. And although their library usage patterns may often be influenced by the requirements of school assignments, their interest in the possibilities of mobile technology may also point the way toward opportunities of further engagement with libraries later in life.
Moreover:
According to our December 2011 national survey, Americans under age 30 are more likely than older adults to do reading of any sort (including books, magazines, journals, newspapers, and online content) for work or school, or to satisfy their own curiosity on a topic. About eight in ten say they read for these professional or educational reasons, more than older age groups. And about three-quarters of younger Americans say they read for pleasure or to keep up with current events.
Pub Scrawl: The Eight Best (Actual) Literary Bars
Here’s a list by Scotland’s own Edd McCracken:
- The Eagle and Child – Oxford, England
- Vesuvio – San Francisco, USA
- Cerveceria Alemana – Madrid, Spain
- The Oxford Bar – Edinburgh, Scotland
- La Closerie des Lilas – Paris, France
- Toners – Dublin, Ireland
- The White Horse Tavern – New York City, USA
- Newman Arms – London, England
Be sure to check out McCracken’s notes on each, as well as the photos.
Two for Halloween
Finally, here are two entries to get you into the Halloween spirit:
Otto Penzler puts the ‘boo’! in ‘Big Book of Ghost Stories’
Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn interviews Otto Penzler about his 833-page collection of 79 creepy, unsettling and suspenseful supernatural tales, The Big Book of Ghost Stories (Vintage, $25).
Truly SINISTER – The Ten Best True Crime Books
A list by Meredith Borders over on LitReactor.
I’ve actually read six of these, with a seventh near the top of my to-be-read-next stack of books. How many have you read?
Tom Wolfe, Ian McEwan and J. K. Rowling Among Fall Authors – NYTimes.com
Wednesday, September 5th, 2012Tom Wolfe, Ian McEwan and J. K. Rowling Among Fall Authors – NYTimes.com
The list reads like a Who’s Who at an exclusive book party: Junot Díaz, Ian McEwan, J. K. Rowling, Zadie Smith and Tom Wolfe.
All are superstar authors who are releasing hugely anticipated books this fall, colliding in one of the most crowded literary traffic jams in recent memory.
Fall is traditionally the biggest season in the book business, the time that publishers reserve for their most high-profile authors. But this year it is especially crammed with writers who are both household names and have not released a book in several years, like the octogenarian Mr. Wolfe, whose last novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” was published in 2004, and Mr. Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which came out in 2007.
Monday Miscellany
Monday, August 20th, 2012Your Favorites: 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels
A while back NPR asked readers/listeners to vote on their favorite YA novels. 75,220 people voted, helping to whittle the list of 235 finalists down to the top 100. In addition to the list of winners, this page includes links to explanations of what exactly constitutes YA literature.
Illustration by Harriet Russell for NPR
A life in writing: Mark Billingham
British crime novelist Mark Billingham has “always believed that location is a character”:
When I began to write I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or LA seemed to have stronger identities. Part of the reason why Scandinavian crime has been so popular is the landscape. It is just so strong and alien. Although without taking anything away, you should probably also never discount the fact that blood does look particularly good against snow.”
Billingham started his professional life as an actor and stand-up comic before becoming a writer of dark crime fiction. His first novel, Sleepyhead, came out in 2001. His most recent novel is Rush of Blood.
The depiction of violence in crime fiction is a perennial source of argument: Val McDermid has claimed that women writers, used to a lifetime of experiencing potential dangers, tend to write about what violence feels like, while men more often write about what it looks like; but she expressly exempted Billingham from this characterisation. He says: “I think I am an exception because I have been through it.” In 1997, Billingham was held hostage at gunpoint in a hotel room and robbed. “When I sat down to write about a year after I was attacked, reflecting the victim’s experience was very important to me. From book one, I wanted the victim to be a major character and not just a plot device. I didn’t want a cop and a killer and victims 1-6 who you don’t know or care about. Even though Thorne [Billingham's series detective] had the most onstage time in Sleepyhead, the character I got most feedback about was the victim, Alison, who was in a locked-in state and doesn’t speak. She was actually much more fully formed than Thorne, although I hope he’s become a bit more fleshed out as time has gone on.”
Here’s what he says about writing about violence:
“I still believe you should show what violence does to people, but it’s done best without depicting the actual mechanics. The single spot of blood on a pristine kitchen floor is far more powerful than blood-spattered walls with messages smeared in it, and it doesn’t detract from how dark or suspenseful a story is.”
Against Enthusiasm: The epidemic of niceness in online book culture
There’s been a lot spoken and written lately about the overwhelming crush of negative book reviews, but on Slate Jacob Silverman expresses the opposite opinion in lamenting “the mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online”:
Whereas critics once performed one role in print and another in life—Rebecca West could savage someone’s book in the morning and dine with him in the evening—social media has collapsed these barriers. Moreover, social media’s centrifugal forces of approbation—retweets, likes, favorites, and the self-consciousness that accompanies each public utterance—make any critique stick out sorely.
Here’s the alternative he proposes:
A better literary culture would be one that’s not so dependent on personal esteem and mutual reinforcement. It would not treat offense or disagreement as toxic. We wouldn’t want so badly to be liked above all. We’d tolerate barbed reviews, some quarrels, and blistering critiques, because they make our culture more interesting and because they are often more sincere reflections of our passions. If we all think more and enthuse less, when I do truly love Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, you’ll be more likely to believe me.
Goodreads v. LibraryThing- Part One
Which social reading network do you prefer, Goodreads or LibraryThing? On BookRiot Amanda Nelson offers the first installment of an in-depth comparison between the two. And there’s a link at the bottom of the page to Part Two.
Dickens’s Best Novel? Six Experts Share Their Opinions
Over on The Millions, six specialists in Victorian literature make their case for what they consider to be the best novel by Charles Dickens.
The Best Books of Fall 2012
Friday, August 10th, 2012Start building your fall reading list now with this list of Publishers Weekly’s picks for the best books scheduled for publication in September, October, and November:
This year’s fall roster is the perfect mix of reader favorites like Dennis Lehane and Richard Russo, and some notable debuts from authors you’ll be hearing a lot more about. We’ve combed through hundreds of books to find our favorites of what’s on tap for the season. There’s a little of everything here, from a book that could just be this generation’s Catch-22, to grand biographies of two very different types of founding fathers, to the return of Peter Rabbit.
