The Essential Kate Atkinson
“Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone.”
Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum stands atop my list of Books to Reread, and I swear that some September (my traditional rereading month) I’m going to get to it. Just about everyone in my book club enjoyed it when we read it back in 1997, and I know I’ll enjoy it again. That first line!
Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
“Most stories in the genre build to a moment of escape. ‘On the Calculation of Volume’ imagines a woman making a life inside an infinitely repeating November 18th.”
Stories like Groundhog Day, which present the same limited time period (usually a single day) on repeat, are called closed time loops. In works like this, the protagonist gets to try over again every day, usually trying to get something right. Here Katy Waldman discusses the English versions of a multi-volume time loop story by Danish author Solvej Balle: “Balle’s series has grown into a cult hit, both in Scandinavia, where the first five of a planned seven books have been released in the original Danish, and, more recently, in the U.S., where New Directions has published English translations of Books I through III.”
Escape Artists | Romantasy at the End of the World
Daniel Yadin discusses romantasy, “whose doorstoppers combining fantasy and romance have, over the past five to ten years, steadily (or maybe stealthily) come to dominate American popular literary culture.”
It is precisely by selling an escape that these books . . . offer a key into the American psyche. In reading them, one gets a view of the strange and horny terrain where the essential dramas of social and political life today — the crises of agency, morality, and adult personhood — can be rehearsed and expiated.
The Claims of Close Reading
Johanna Winant is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Reed College and co-editor (with Dan Sinykin) of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. In this article she describes her experiences teaching close reading to students.
I found particularly interesting her point that even beginning students of literature are capable of expressing how a work affects them. They experience the literature long before they learn the vocabulary and other technical aspects of literary criticism.
How Much Does Annotating Help You Remember What You Read?
This is a good companion piece to Winant’s essay (cited directly above). River H. Kero explains how annotating “helps with memory, comprehension, and overall understanding for what you read.”
The Secret to Getting Through Big, Dense, Difficult Books
“Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal.”
Sebastian Castillo explains how friends—“both real and online”—helped him through a reading of philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s magnum opus The Ethics. “Learning is both painful and pleasant — and above all, communal,” Castillo writes.
The idea of a difficult reading club doesn’t need to be dedicated to philosophy; we can never know from which knotty corner the world will reveal something essential about our lives. What matters, I believe, is the challenge, regardless of whether that work yields anything concrete. It’s the process itself that is instructive.
I’m planning to read Dan Brown’s recent The Secret of Secrets (677 pages) on an upcoming 6-hour flight, if anyone cares to join me.
A Theory of Dumb
“It’s not just screens or COVID or too-strong weed. Maybe the culprit of our cognitive decline is unfettered access to each other.”
I just love how the universe sometimes provides random sequences of vastly different yet somehow tangentially related ideas. Whereas Castillo, in the article referenced directly above, found intellectual camaraderie in communal experience, in this article Lane Brown attributes an observed trend of people “ask[ing] less and less of our brains” to devices that have exponentially increased “the volume of human noise we’re now wired into”:
we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think.
“The medium is still the message, but the medium, today, is the mob.”
Sylvia Plath Was Reading This Novel Before She Died. It’s Brilliant.
“Now unjustly overlooked, ‘The Ha-Ha’ is the prizewinning first novel by Jennifer Dawson, an accomplished mid-20th-century chronicler of women and madness.”
According to writer and editor Naomi Huffman, Sylvia Plath was reading the novel The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson the weekend before her suicide. Dawson’s novel, which, according to Huffman, shows “significant similarities” to Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, which had been published one month earlier.
The Ha-Ha has recently been rereleased by Scribner with an introduction by novelist Melissa Broder.
True Crime
News site 1440 offers an aggregated primer on the true crime genre. The examination looks into why true crime is so popular and how it has been written.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
