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This Is Your Brain on Tropes: Why Readers are Addicted to the Familiar
In the world of literature, a trope is:
(A) a recurring theme or motif, as in literature or art: the heroic trope, the trope of motherhood, the heroic trope.
(B) a convention or device that establishes a predictable or stereotypical representation of a character, setting, or scenario in a creative work:
- The author relies on our knowledge of the Haunted House trope to set the scene.
- From her introduction in the movie, the character is nothing but a Damsel in Distress trope.
- The author relies on our knowledge of the Haunted House trope to set the scene.
Monique Snyman explains that “tropes aren’t just lazy storytelling, as so many people like to say. Tropes are brain candy. And our brains are wired to crave them.”
How Publishing Has Changed Since 2015
Nuggets of knowledge from Jane Friedman, the self-proclaimed guru of all things publishing related.
How Book of the Month club survived 100 years of a turbulent publishing industry
Back in the early 1970s, when I was a fledgling college instructor and a grad student in English, I and a lot of my fellow students subscribed to Book of the Month Club because one of introductory perks was The Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
In 2016, two new owners dramatically refurbished the company and, “in the midst of the direct-to-consumer boom, they relaunched it as a subscription business targeted at millennials—and particularly women, who make up the majority of its customers.”
In Praise of CliffsNotes Study Guides in the Age of AI
In another blast from the past, science writer Joelle Renstrom extols the virtues of CliffsNotes (although I remember these little yellow-and-black books as Cliff Notes): “CliffsNotes have at least four main advantages over contemporary tools when it comes to literary analysis—advantages I didn’t see or appreciate until ChatGPT stormed onto the scene.”
The AI-Powered PDF Marks the End of an Era
“As Adobe rolls out more generative AI features for the PDF, the era of chatbot-less software is firmly a thing of the past.”
Adobe first introduced the PDF (portable document format) in 1993 as “a multipurpose container that replicated the appearance and functionality of physical documents.” But now, Reece Rogers writes for Wired, “Adobe is attempting to embed generative AI into the PDF as an essential aspect of the experience.” Rogers sees the new Adobe Acrobat Studio software as “a harbinger of generative AI further seeping into everyday, essential software, in a way that changes the experience for everyone.”
Teenager with hyperthymesia exhibits extraordinary mental time travel abilities
In my younger reading years, I would sometimes come across something in a novel that made me think, “That would never happen.” I meant this as a criticism, an accusation that the literary work did not live up to my expectations of it as an accurate representative of human life experience.
Thankfully, I’ve mellowed considerably over the last 50 years or so. I can now occasionally approach fantasy and science fiction as acceptable vehicles for exploring the human condition. Something that has aided my literary maturation is studying psychology and reading articles such as this one:
A new case study describes a teenage girl with an extraordinary ability to recall personal memories in vivid detail and mentally revisit specific moments in her life at will. Her experiences reflect a rare condition known as hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory. The report, published in Neurocase, highlights her unusual capacity for mental time travel—not only into the past, but also into imagined futures—offering researchers new insight into how autobiographical memory may be organized and accessed in the brain.
There truly are more possibilities of human experience than my younger self dreamt of.
It’s Okay to Hate The House of Mirth
“Carlo Rotella on Reading (and Learning) from Books We Dislike”
I don’t hate Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (scroll down the linked page). In fact, I’ve read it three, maybe four, times. Every time, I hope Lily Bart’s story will end differently—although, of course, it never does. This is a problem I often think of as “when enjoy isn’t the right word” to apply to my reading experience.
I don’t enjoy reading about Lily Bart’s downfall. But do I understand it? Yes. Do I appreciate Wharton’s novel as a representation of its time and place? Again, yes. Do I learn from reading this book? Absolutely.
This may just be a matter of semantics, similar to the problem I have with the comment—which I see frequently—of not liking any of the characters (a matter that I’ve discussed here and here). In this excerpt from his book What Can I Get Out of This?, I find refreshing Carlo Rotella’s ways of reframing our approach to a literary work by asking, “What kind of reader does this book want me to be?”
What books shaped you in high school? Here’s what you said
From NPR:
This summer, we asked you to tell us about the books you read in high school that profoundly affected you. It turns out you had a lot to share. More than 1,100 of you wrote back to tell us about the formative texts you were assigned as teens.
There aren’t any real surprises on the list of books mentioned most often, with To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and 1984 by George Orwell at the top.
7 Debut Collections About Knowing a Place Across Generations
Some writers have an uncanny ability to make the setting of their fiction almost a character in itself. Here Mariah Rigg offers a list of books that do just that for these seven places: Hawaii; the Philippines; Houston, TX; Colorado; Florida; Newark, New Jersey; and Seattle, Washington.
C-SPAN Is Starting a (Very “Patriotic”) Book Club
Read the mandate and the line-up for this show, scheduled to start this fall, then make what you will of it.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
