Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas
James B. Blasingame is a professor of English at Arizona State University and a former high school English teacher who has “tried to learn as much as I can about the history of censorship in this country and pass it to my students, in order to prepare them for what may lie ahead in their careers as English teachers.” Here he explains the significance of a recent court ruling about school censorship in Florida.
Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy
“In the age of automation, human workers are being brought in to fix what artificial intelligence gets wrong.”
Anyone concerned about the spreading threat of AI will appreciate the irony in this news story from NBC News. Be sure to look at the examples.
Why AI Narrators Will Never Be Able to Tell a Real Human Story
Adam Verner, a full-time audiobook narrator, “explores the uncanny valley of automated audiobooks.”
“The first homo sapiens 300,000 years ago were telling stories around the fire,” he writes, referring to Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal. “The corporate urge to replace art-making humans with machines is profoundly anti-human.”
Verner teaches students interested in entering the world of audiobook narration. I love the way he describes the audionarrator’s function:
When preparing a manuscript, I tell my students to ask “where’s the love?” Every book is born out of love, every story told for a reason. I tell them even in a third person novel, that third person is a person. Who are they? Name them and why they’re telling this story, who they’re telling it to, and why now. In our world there is no such thing as an omniscient narrator.
Growing Up in a Library Is Exactly As Magical As You’d Imagine
If you’re a bibliophile (and I assume that you are if you’re reading this blog), you see lots of descriptions of books about living and working in a library or bookshop. Yes, such a life sounds like a wonderful fantasy. But, as with most imaginings, it has actually happened in real life: “When New York City’s branch libraries were first built, each one had an apartment on the third floor for a live-in caretaker, who would keep the library clean and its coal furnaces burning.” Read all about it here.
On the Conservatism of Contemporary Literary Fiction
A curious contradiction has overtaken contemporary literary fiction. Though nearly all its authors, editors, publishers, and readers would likely describe themselves as progressive, more and more of the stories that win acclaim and are published in top-tier magazines embody a conservative view of the world.
Assuming that “the typical reader of literary fiction [is] (female, college-educated, middle class),” Nathaniel Moore writes that most current published works of literary fiction picture a world “full of structural injustice so deeply entrenched that a single protagonist cannot effect lasting and meaningful change against the powers that be.”
Moore calls such books conservative because they reflect beliefs their typical readers already hold rather than presenting “the service that groundbreaking literature has historically offered: a new way of imagining the world and one’s place in it.”
I’m still thinking about whether his analysis holds up in terms of the most interesting novels I’ve read recently. What do you think?
Books To Read in Your 60s
This list is from publisher Penguin Random House, so its selections are self-serving, but there’s a wide range of choices, both fiction and nonfiction.
Patrick Ryan on the Secrets of the Omniscient Narrator
Patrick Ryan, author of the recently published and much acclaimed novel Buckeye, reminds us of a crucial distinction it’s easy to forget when reading fiction: The author is not the narrator. The narrator of a fictional work is a literary character, just like all the other characters, created by the author to tell the story.
7 Obscure Literary Devices
I love articles like this one because they remind me to read fiction more mindfully, to think about what authors are doing and how they are doing it, rather than just let the story wash over me.
8 Wastelands from World Literature
“These novels and memoirs from Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere explore the most inhospitable landscapes known to humankind”
One of my most formative literary experiences was reading T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land in a literary survey course my freshman year in college. I think that’s what drew me to this article, even though I knew right away that the wastelands discussed here would be more literal than Eliot’s metaphorical one.
As Shelley Fairweather-Vega, a professional translator from Seattle, Washington, points out here, “there is plenty to learn from unpleasant places, both in life and in literature.”
21 Books to Make You Think
The folks at BookBub have compiled this “wide-ranging list of all kinds of books that will help you use your brain,” and they promise enjoyment as well. The entries include both fiction and nonfiction.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
