Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category

« Older Entries

Monday Miscellany

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Authors weigh in on their favorite page-to-screen adaptations

The opening of the latest film version of The Great Gatsby has focused interest on adaptations of books into movies. Here authors Dennis Lehane, Chuck Palahniuk, Judy Blume, Bret Easton Ellis, Warren Adler, and Kelly Oxford discuss “the times Hollywood got it right.”


A Nigerian-’Americanah’ Novel About Love, Race And Hair

Cover: Americanah

An interview with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about her latest novel, Americanah.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has much of interest to say in this interview, especially about the immigration of Nigeians into the United States and the United Kingdom. But I found particularly eye-opening her own experience with stereotyping:

“I sometimes wonder whether we should change the terminology and instead of talking about race, maybe just talk about skin color, because Ifemelu didn’t really think of herself in terms of her skin color when she was in Nigeria. So coming to the U.S. and discovering that she was black was an entirely new thing. And it’s quite different from being in Nigeria and knowing that there are tensions between Igbo and Yoruba and Hausa. It’s a very different thing. But you know, what’s, I think, particularly absurd about race is how immediate it is. That it doesn’t matter what your history is, what your — it’s really about how you look.

“And I’ll tell you a story. So when I first came to the U.S., much like Ifemelu, I just didn’t think of myself as black. And I wrote an essay in class, and my professor wanted to know who ‘A-dee-chee’ was — Americans often call me ‘A-dee-chee,’ and often tell me that my name makes them imagine that I might be Italian. And so when I raised my hand, because, you know, ‘Who wrote the best essay? This is the best essay; who’s A-dee-chee?’ I raised my hand. And on his face, for a fleeting moment, was surprise. And I realized that the person who wrote the best essay in the class was not supposed to look like me. And it was quite early on in my time in the U.S., but it was just sort of that very tiny moment where I realize, ‘Oh, right, so that’s what this is about.’ “

Sookie Stackhouse author receiving death threats

In a case of life imitating the art of Stephen King’s Misery, CBC Books reports that author Charlaine Harris has been receiving death threats:

Charlaine Harris’s bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels, the basis for the hugely popular HBO TV series True Blood, has inspired a legion of devoted fans, but some of those fans have turned on the author — even threatened her life — after the ending of the final book of the series was leaked.

Dead Ever After, the 13th and final novel in the series, was released this week, but one reader in Germany managed to receive an advance copy and posted major spoilers on Amazon in April.

Southland, one of the best dramas on TV, deserves to be renewed

We could all stand to purge a few cop shows from the nation’s collective television diet, but TNT’s Southland isn’t one of them.

I couldn’t agree more.

Choice Critical for Promoting Reading, Says Canadian Study

Publishers Weekly reports on a study commissioned by the National Reading Campaign in Canada. The study focused “on ways to build a nation of people who love to read, as opposed to literacy strategies to ensure that the population can read.”

Study results, released last week, were “that giving people choice and control over what they read as well as in related social interactions are key factors in instilling a love of reading.” Working in groups is particularly important for developing literacy among teens, the study found. Sharon Murphy, associate professor of education at York University in Toronto and author of the study report, wrote that there are “many long-term societal benefits associated with being a nation of avid readers, including increased civic engagement, empathy for others, and improved cognitive and academic development.”


Do Readers Judge Female Characters More Harshly Than Male Characters?

In an April 29 interview with Claire Messud, Publisher Weekly’s Annasue McCleave Wilson wondered whether Messud would want to be friends with her protagonist, Nora. Nora was, after all, just so very angry, “almost unbearably grim.”

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of a question is that?” Messud shot back (understandably), proceeding to rattle off any number of unpleasant male protagonists, from Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath to Dostoyevsky’s Roskolnikov, about whom, one presumes, no one would even think to ask such a question. “If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry,” Messud says, “It’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.”

On the basis of this interview, Maria Konnikova examines two key questions:

First, do people treat male and female literary characters differently? That is, are readers actually more inclined to evaluate female, as opposed to male, protagonists on the basis of their potential as friendship material? And second, gender issues aside, what kind of a question is that, anyway—a legitimate one, or, in essence, a fairly dumb one? Should we be going to literature to look for potential friends in the first place?

Posted in Author News, Fiction, Film, Reading, Television | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Books —> Film

The latest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is garnering most of the attention in this category right now, but there’s other news as well. Here’s some news on upcoming films:

Will Baz Luhrmann’s noise dampen ‘Great Gatsby’s’ joys?

“Seattle Times movie critic Moira Macdonald revisits the book’s melancholy beauty prior to the movie’s release.”

The Confidence Index: What Maisie Knew

Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897/1898) is one of my favorite novels. Jennifer Paull has news about the upcoming film version.

Frances McDormand and Director Lisa Cholodenko Team Up for HBO’s Olive Kitteridge Adaptation

Before it became a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, McDormand fell hard for Elizabeth Strout’s interwoven collection of vignettes set in a backwater town along the coast of Maine connected by the titular plainspoken protagonist who reveals deep reserves of humanity and empathy (even for the most jagged and broken characters) as the novel unfolds.

Salman Rushdie bequeaths ‘Midnight’s Children’ to film

This article provides an overview of Rushdie’s life and career along with news about the film adaptation of his most famous novel.

Parents, Children, and Libraries

The Pew Internet and American Life Project studies many aspects of American life, including attitudes toward and uses of books and libraries. Here are some of the latest research findings:

Research in the Digital Age: It’s More Than Finding Information…

Two middle school teachers offer advice on how to teach students to evaluate information they find on the internet. This information may seem elementary, but it’s advice all of us can use.

Gillian Flynn on her bestseller Gone Girl and accusations of misogyny

Gone Girl has taken the publishing world by storm with its disturbing portrayal of a relationship gone badly wrong. Author Gillian Flynn talks about how she portrays women, her childhood love of horror – and how her marriage inspired the book

Posted in Fiction, Film, Libraries, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

Amazon Buys Goodreads

Friday, March 29th, 2013

Amazon Buys Goodreads.

Just in case you missed the day’s hottest literary topic. . .

Posted in Book News, Reading | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, March 25th, 2013

Scientific Explanations for Why Spoilers Are So Horrible

Like Jennifer Richler, I have the most recent season of Downton Abbey tucked away on my DVR, though I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. But because of the internet and, especially Twitter, I already know what big plot turns I’ll find when I do sit down to enjoy it. Yes, spoilers are everywhere, and unless you live under a rock, it’s impossible to avoid them.

In this article Richler summarizes the research into exactly what spoilers spoil: “Studies show that anticipation and suspension of disbelief are both key ingredients in a pleasurable experience—and spoilers have a tendency to kill both.”

The fickle fate of fiction: what book reviews reveal decades later

Russell Smith discusses a growing trend: “collecting bad early reviews of canonical books and putting them up as a kind of lesson in perseverance for aspiring writers.” He calls these reviews

interesting because of what they show us about changing standards of criticism. The New Statesman’s 1925 review of The Great Gatsby includes a whopper of a plot spoiler – it tells the whole story, right down to Gatsby’s climactic death. That suggests that these critics thought of themselves as essayists rather than as adjuncts of the bookselling trade.

Smith also looks at the same tendency to criticize literary classics in “a simultaneous contemporary re-evaluation of the classics going on at social reading sites like Goodreads. Here, too, one finds completely fresh and often angrily populist responses to works regarded as sacred to those in the literary business.”

Do We Need to Identify With a Protagonist to Enjoy a Novel?

I’ve always been vaguely uneasy when I hear people say they don’t like a particular novel because they couldn’t identify with any of the characters. I read literature to learn about aspects of life beyond the scope of my own experiences. I don’t expect to identify with characters. I expect to learn how they deal with the vagaries of their own lives.

In discussing this question, Evan Gottlieb first points out a basic difference between literature written in the 17th century and earlier, and literature written during and after the 18th century:

Prior to the 18th century, most authors in the Western tradition didn’t worry too much about whether their characters’ motivations seemed realistic to readers; their conceptions of character were largely static or symbolic, and their protagonists were exemplary or humorous as a result.

Only in works of the 18th century and later does the notion of character depth and development become a real issue. Therefore, the question of identifying with characters can only be applied to literature of that period. And here’s what Gottlieb has to say about this question:

And so we return to the question of whether fictional protagonists need to be relatable in order for readers to enjoy ourselves. If relatable merely means likable, then I think the answer is no: many classic fictional heroes and heroines, including Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Rodion Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, are not particularly likable. But if we expand our definition of “relatable” to mean psychologically plausible, then I think the answer is yes. We may not always like, or even approve of, fictional protagonists like selfish Catherine and obsessive Raskolnikov. But I think we have much to gain from learning to recognize reflections of ourselves in them, even — or perhaps especially — when we want to deny any resemblances. There are, of course, many other good reasons to read literature: for entertainment, for instruction, for inspiration. But from the 18th century onward, novels have shown themselves to be remarkably effective, durable technologies for encouraging us to extend our understanding to others, no matter how different or unlikable they might initially appear.

Here he seems to be getting at what has always made me uncomfortable about readers who want to identify with characters. I don’t need to identify with characters, but I do expect a good piece of literature to allow me to understand them. This is, perhaps, a small distinction, but I think it’s definitely one worth making.

O Revelations! Letters, Once Banned, Flesh Out Willa Cather

For decades Willa Cather has been a peculiar enigma in 20th-century American literature: beloved by ordinary readers for vivid evocations of frontier life in novels like “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia,” but walled off from closer personal scrutiny by some of the tightest archival restrictions this side of J. D. Salinger.

Jennifer Schuessler has good news for fans of Willa Cather, who was thought to have destroyed most of her letters and ordered that any surviving ones never be published or quoted. Next month The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, “an anthology of 566 of the roughly 3,000 letters that turned out to have survived, scattered in some 75 archives,” will be published. These letters will provide scholars a chance to learn something about the life and personality of an author who wanted to be known solely by her books.

Posted in Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, March 18th, 2013

How Literature Saved My Psyche: Attending a Book-Themed Therapy Session at the Center for Fiction

Just read this. That is all.

Nicholas Royle’s top 10 first novels

Clever Nicholas Royle:

First Novel, my seventh, is all about first novels (and other stuff). My narrator, a creative writing tutor, tries to help students write their debuts while struggling with his own second novel. Meanwhile he pores over photos of writers’ rooms in a certain newspaper searching for validation in the form of a glimpse of his own first novel on someone else’s shelves.

Here are his top 10 first novels, listed alphabetically by author:

  1. Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte
  2. Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson
  3. The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
  4. The Horned Man by James Lasdun
  5. A Dandy in Aspic by Derek Marlowe
  6. The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
  7. Mystery Story by David Pirie
  8. Vault by David Rose
  9. Quilt by Nicholas Royle
  10. The Tenant by Roland Topor

Free College-Level Writing & Literature Classes

GalleyCat provides links to “nine college-level writing classes, offerings ranging from science fiction to writing to mythology” offered through the new consortium Coursera.

Just Saying “Yes”: Joyce Carol Oates

Here’s an interesting sketch of prolific author Joyce Carol Oates, who will turn 75 in June.

Oates, who has been called a quintessentially American author, grew up in upstate New York, one of three children of a factory worker and a housewife; she was the first of her family to graduate from high school and she writes out of a kind of homesickness for the farms, fields, and creeks of that place. Some of Oates’s most memorable novels have strong female characters—The Grave Digger’s Daughter and Mudwoman, to name two. “I sometimes conflate myself and my [paternal] grandmother and/or my mother. I put generations together,” she says. Though violence is a frequent theme in Oates’s work, she says she grew up on the “periphery” of it, never experiencing it herself. Her great-grandfather, however, killed himself in front of her grandmother and intended to take the child’s life as well. Oates’s mother, Carolina, was abandoned when she was young. Oates learned about the experience when O, the Oprah Magazine approached her and other women writers to interview their mothers for an article. Oprah, whom Oates calls “an American original,” had chosen We Were the Mulvaneys as her book club selection, and so Oates agreed to do the piece. Her mother, well into her 80s at the time, had never before spoken about her past, and she wept as she told Oates by telephone how her biological mother had given her away, that “she didn’t want her”.

Posted in Author News, Book Recommendations, Fiction, Monday Miscellany, Oddities, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, February 11th, 2013

Feeling 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.

Posted in Author News, Book News, Libraries, Literary History, Monday Miscellany, Publishing, Reading | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, February 4th, 2013

Hogwarts Is in Your Head, Harry: Conspiracy Theories About Literature

Harry Potter

Warner Bros.

Emily Temple weighs in over at The Atlantic:

Sherlock Holmes and Watson are lovers, Winnie the Pooh is a mental-illness allegory, and other theories that might forever alter your favorite books.

There was a pretty fascinating article over at Salon earlier this month, in which Greg Olear argues that Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was gay and in love with the novel’s eponymous character. Though a Google search indicates that Olear’s not exactly the first person to think of this, I admit I’d never considered the idea before, and his arguments are pretty persuasive. The article got me thinking about the other theories and alternate interpretations that are floating around about classic literary characters. Below, an investigation, and perhaps a few sides of characters you’ve never seen before.

Now we all know that I’m a student of the intersections between literature and psychology, but, well, it’s just too easy to get carried away with this kind of thing once you get started.

Writers writing about writing: ‘Why We Write’

Joan Didion had it right. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she lays out the template in no uncertain terms: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

David L. Ulin, book critic for the Los Angeles Times, describes the newly released Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Writers on How and Why They Do What They Do, edited by Meredith Maran.

See what writers including Mary Karr, Sara Gruen, James Frey, Susan Orlean, Rick Moody, Jane Smiley, Walter Mosley and Armistead Maupin have to say about their craft.

The Art of Marginalia

I, of course, could not pass up an article about the act of writing notes in the margins of books.

In addition to a neat photo of a well marked-up book, Jocelyn Kelley includes links to two other articles from the New Yorker and the New York Times.

16 Great Library Scenes in Film

When news broke last week that Dan Brown’s new novel will center on some sort of mystery surrounding Dante’s Inferno, I immediately began hoping that there is a nutty, fun scene of Robert Langdon racing around a library just like he raced around the Louvre in The Da Vinci Code.

And because I am who I am, it got me thinking about great movie library scenes that already exist. At first, I thought the list would be pretty short, but you know what? Hollywood loves a library. Some combination of ambiance, seclusion, hidden knowledge, and the sheer beauty of shelves upon shelves of books make libraries a fantastic film setting.

Jeff O’Neal, the editor of Book Riot, was surprised to find 16—SIXTEEN!—noteworthy library scenes in films.

Can you think of any that he left out?

The Best Coffee Mugs for Book Lovers

banned books mug

With Valentine’s Day coming up fast, here’s a whole cupboard full of gift suggestions.

This one is my favorite.

Silent reading isn’t so silent, at least, not to your brain

The blogger at Neurotic Physiology, who says she has a Ph. D. in physiology, discusses some recent research into whether “silent reading” is truly silent to our brains. The study she’s describing involved only four participants (but there are good reasons for the small sample size, as NP explains) and is therefore quite limited. But the results are interesting:

What’s particularly new about this study is that it not only shows that silent reading causes high-frequency electrical activity in auditory areas, but it shows that these areas as specific to voices speaking a language. This activity was only present when the person was paying attention to the task. The authors believe that these results back up the hypothesis that we all produce an “inner voice” when reading silently. And it is enhanced by attention, suggesting that it’s probably not an automatic process, but something that occurs when we attentively process what we are reading. And the next time you read silently, remember that it’s not quite to silent to your brain.

Be sure to read the comments. They’ll have you contemplating the reading voice in your own head.

The Nuclear Monsters That Terrorized the 1950s

What would a visiting alien learn from Them!, Godzilla, and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman?

People who want to talk about the jumpy, kitschy, gloriously lurid movie genre we now know as 1950s sci-fi usually start with Susan Sontag. This is not because Sontag is a bug-eyed alien or 50 feet tall but because she wrote, in 1965, the definitive essay on Cold War dystopian fantasy: “The Imagination of Disaster.” “We live,” she claimed in that piece, “under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” The job of science fiction was at once to “lift us out of the unbearably humdrum … by an escape into dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings” and to “normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.”

In other words, a good horror/fantasy/sci-fi flick provides a healthy dose of escapism, but it also keeps one eye fastened on what we wish to escape from.

Katy Waldman examines some of these classic movies and lists some conclusions we might draw from them:

  1. That science is amoral.
  2. That the universe exists in black-and-white.
  3. That women are scary. And sexy, too, just like the bomb itself.

Posted in Film, Libraries, Literary Criticism, Monday Miscellany, Notes in the Margin, Oddities, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Making 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

image from Pride and Prejudice

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.

Posted in Book News, Fiction, Film, Literary History, Monday Miscellany, Oddities, Reading | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

It’s been a good week for literature-relating reading.

The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Robert Gottlieb, author of Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, explains why he thinks these are Dickens’s 10 best books:

  1. Great Expectations
  2. Our Mutual Friend
  3. David Copperfield
  4. Bleak House
  5. Little Dorrit
  6. Oliver Twist
  7. Nicholas Nickleby
  8. Dombey and Son
  9. The Pickwick Papers
  10. The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

The Education of Virginia Woolf

At The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz uses the publication of volume 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf  as the springboard to a discussion of Virginia Woolf as discerning reader of literature: “Taken as a whole, Woolf’s essays are probably the most intense paean to reading—an activity pursued not for a purpose but for love—ever written in English.”

The multivolume compilation The Essays of Virginia Woolf has been out of print for decades, and readers have been awaiting the conclusion of this expertly edited and lavishly annotated scholarly edition of Woolf’s complete essays for nearly 25 years. At last the project is finished with this, the sixth volume, which was published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Woolf’s death last year. This installment, which gathers the pieces she wrote from 1933 until her suicide in 1941, poignantly illuminates the effort and ideals that informed her critical writing. Woolf became a financially secure novelist in 1928 with the publication of Orlando, yet she continued to toil at her relatively unremunerative reviews. For example, by cross-referencing her letters and diaries, Stuart N. Clarke, this volume’s editor, reveals that in November 1936, Woolf began work on her lapidary, psychologically astute, tender essay on Edward Gibbon. That project demanded that she read his journals, letters, and the six drafts of his autobiography—and reread the six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the work that naturally forms the cynosure of her piece. She labored at this review through the winter and spring of 1937 (“I’ve spent all the morning, every morning, writing; every evening reading. I had to dash through Gibbon”), until its publication that May. For this staggering quantity of work, she was paid 28 pounds, equal to something like $2,500 today—a nice lump sum, but a minuscule per-hour rate.

Famous authors: Why their biggest fans love to hate them

Declaring “the more beloved a particular book becomes, the more responsibility the author has to treat their readers with respect and understanding,” the folks at hypable list authors they love to hate:

  • J. K. Rowling
  • Suzanane Collins
  • George R. R. Martin
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • John Green

On Bad Endings

On The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog Joan Acocella declares:

Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests.

Read why she hates the endings of these well known novels:

  • David Copperfield
  • Wuthering Heights
  • Song of the Lark
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors

The Hollywood Reporter offers its list of:

those living authors who have been most successful in shepherding their books from page to screen, balancing success in publishing (total output, sales, best-sellers) and in Hollywood (completed adaptations, projects in development, screenwriting and producing credits) while accounting for cultural influence. More power to them.

Yes, some of the big names—Stephenie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, Nicholas Sparks, George R. R. Martin—are there at the top of the list, but some of the names farther down might surprise you.

Tags: ,
Posted in Book Recommendations, Fiction, Film, Literary Criticism, Literary History, Monday Miscellany, Reading | No Comments »

Monday Miscellany

Monday, November 26th, 2012

For Your Holiday Gift-Giving

book treeNow that the winter holiday gift-giving season has officially arrived, here are a couple of items to keep in mind:

Holidaze, Book Riot’s Pinterest Board

100 books for holiday gift-giving, courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Media Elite: The Best Literary Cameos Ever Committed to Film

Though an author’s film cameo is often a lights-on, fully-clothed activity, that doesn’t make it any less sexy, ego-gratifying or even illicit than many of the other perks that go along with presiding over a pop culture empire. The gods of the literary world have long held a special mystique for Hollywood as the Platonic form storyteller; and the movie industry has kissed the ring in the only way it knows how — by pointing a camera at them.

author collage

 

On Our Location: New e-book affirms the crucial relationship of story and setting

Gina K. Hackett, a writer for The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, reports on a fascinating new piece of eliterature: an iPhone/iPad app that uses GPS to allow readers to access a fictional narrative, then contribute to the story. The app reinforces the interaction between story and setting.

Unfortunately, those of us who don’t live in Massachusetts seem to be left out of this new experience unless we’re willing to travel.

A Brief History of the Literary Sea Monster

Author Robert Pobi:

When I sat down to write Mannheim Rex, I had a rich literary history to visit. Forget the things that go bump in the night; here comes a list of sea monsters that could swallow you whole.

Or tear you to pieces.

Take a look at his 10 examples, which range from the great fish in The Adventures of Pinocchio to the shark in Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

One for the Road

Well, whaddya know, Marilyn Stasio, mystery reviewer for The New York Times, has discovered the beauty of audiobooks. I’ve been a big fan of audiobooks for years, and during those years I discovered that mysteries are particularly good for listening to, especially on long drives. One time on a road trip from St. Louis to Florida my husband, teenaged daughter, and I pulled into a gas station for a pit stop but stayed in the car until we had reached the end of an action scene in Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger.

Anyway, read why Stasio recommends the following audiobooks:

  • Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
  • Creole Belle by James Lee Burke
  • The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain
  • Gun Games by Faye Kellerman
  • Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino
  • Return of the Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Speaking Volumes

Also in The New York Times, William Grimes addresses both the pros and the cons of audiobooks:

In reality, the book-length recitation turns out to be a very tricky medium. A good reader can lift a mediocre book above its station. A bad reader can ruin a masterpiece. And there are all kinds of variation in between: A so-so book rich with incident and characters can delight, while a good book can be good in the wrong ways, with sumptuous, tightly written sentences that make it almost impossible to stick with, especially for listeners who are driving, or making dinner — which is to say, most of the intended audience.

Read what he has to say about these recent audio renditions:

  • Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
  • This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
  • Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
  • The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling
  • Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  • State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

 

Posted in Audiobooks, Book Recommendations, Ebooks, Fiction, Monday Miscellany, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

« Older Entries