After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Keith Woodhouse discusses “an emerging subgenre that we might call the ‘climate assessment drama.’ These books are vast in size and scope and, at the same time, narrowly concerned with the particular political, ethical, and technical conundrums of the world climate change has wrought.”
Why Do Doctors Write?
During my teenage years, I wanted to become a medical doctor. Alas, that career did not come to pass for me, but I’ve always been interested in why doctors, most of whom have horrendously heavy work hours, often take up writing as a sideline. Here Danielle Ofri, a primary-care doctor at Bellevue Hospital and the author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error, explains her multi-faceted motivation.
The Best Weird Fiction Books
Weird fiction uses the supernatural to throw all our experience into doubt, says author and academic Michael Cisco. He introduces us to five favourites, featuring everything from ghosts to fairies to cults – all subtly constructed, infused with real human feeling, and calculated to perturb.
Cisco defines weird fiction as “an offshoot of horror fiction that dwells particularly on the supernatural, and on the way that the existence of the supernatural throws all experience into doubt.”
Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?
“We have tended to imagine machines as either being our slaves or enslaving us. Martha Wells, the writer of the ‘Murderbot’ series, tries to conjure a truly alien consciousness.”
“Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages,” writes Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “[w]hat has begun to change, in only the last decade, is the possibility that such questions will themselves escape the bonds of metaphor, and that we might soon have to deal with artificially conscious beings in a quite literal sense.”
Here Lewis-Kraus focuses on Murderbot, the creation of fantasy writer Martha Wells, that is featured on the recent Apple TV+ series of the same title.
Does Using ChatGPT Change Your Brain Activity? Study Sparks Debate
There’s no avoiding articles that focus on the myriad aspects of how the use of AI is affecting human cognition. Here’s one such article aiming “to assess whether artificial intelligence (AI) is making us cognitively lazy.”
‘It opened up something in me’: Why people are turning to bibliotherapy
“‘Bibliotherapy’ has been soaring in popularity as a means of improving people’s wellbeing. But getting it right depends on the book, and the person.”
Writing for the BBC, Katarina Zimmer notes that bibliotherapy “has been soaring in popularity as a means of improving people’s wellbeing, help navigate tough life decisions, and even to treat specific mental health conditions” in the U.K. and elsewhere. Zimmer here examines the evidence for the effectiveness of both nonfiction, self-help reading and “creative bibliotherapy,” which immerses readers in fictional worlds.
Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend
“Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework?”
Well, how could I NOT include this piece in a blog called Notes in the Margin? Read how social media promote making one’s reading experiences into “#aesthetic artifacts.”
A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online
At a recent gathering in our retirement community, lots of people were surprised when I mentioned that I have a spreadsheet of all the books I’ve read since May 1991. The next book I finish reading and add to the spreadsheet will be number 1963, but I’ll never catch up with Dan Pelzer, whose handwritten list of the 3,599 books he read over 60 years is discussed here. His family had the list digitized, and you can look at it with the link provided at the beginning of this article.
Cabaret Condemns and Shows Fascism’s Sinister Allure
“Cabaret’s depiction of a Weimar-era nightclub reveals how easy it is to slip between satire of, indifference to, and complicity with Nazi aesthetics.”
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
