We’re All Reading Wrong
“To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.”
Journalist Alexandra Moe informs us “Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud.” She continues: “To reap the full benefits of reading, we should be doing it out loud, all the time, with everyone we know.”
Read on to learn the benefits of reading out loud, even without an audience, and the best types of sources to read to reap those benefits.
What Do You Do When the Biggest Platforms For Readers Are Kind of Evil?
“Maris Kreizman on the Ethical Pitfalls of the Digital World”
Literary critic and essayist Maris Kreizman laments all the literary-related digital platforms that have ties to people and companies with whom she is not “ideologically aligned.” Examples include Spotify, Substack, and the Washington Post.
Facing a mental health crisis, an NJ school pulled a beloved novel from English class
NPR reports on an issue that sheds a new light on the question of schools censoring literary course content. Because five students in a school district in New Jersey have attempted suicide this school year, the district has removed Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from an advanced placement English literature and composition class at the public high school.
The novel’s removal was requested by school administrators, not parents, “as part of a broader response to a five-alarm fire of mental health issues among students.” The article examines the reasons for the request and the steps the school district is taking to help deal with the larger mental health issues. It is a thorough discussion of a large and complex issue.
How Finding My Narrator Brought My Entire Book Together
“Burnside Soleil on Living with His Characters”
I don’t write fiction, but as a reader and critic of fiction, I’ve always thought that the first question authors must deal with when they sit down to write is “Whose story is this to tell?” In other words, “Who must narrate this story?”
Here poet Burnside Soleil describes how he found the voice that pulled together his book, Berceuse Parish.
Books and screens
“Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time”
The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
Carlo Iaconois, a university librarian at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia, disagrees: “the diagnosis is wrong.” Screens in themselves aren’t “attention-destroying”; the real problem is that “the dominant platforms have been deliberately engineered to fragment attention in service of advertising revenue.”
Reading may protect older adults against loneliness better than some social activities
A new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that engaging in daily reading may help protect older adults against feelings of loneliness. This is particularly true for individuals with very few close friends or family members. The research provides evidence that a regular, engaging solitary routine can act as a practical buffer against social isolation, sometimes offering even greater benefits than participating in organized group activities.
‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story?
“His novel was praised for giving a voice to the victims of Algeria’s brutal civil war. But one woman has accused Kamel Daoud of having stolen her story – and the ensuing legal battle has become about much more than literary ethics”
Madeleine Schwartz, a freelance journalist based in Paris, takes a long look in The Guardian at a case that goes way beyond questions of literary ethics. While rightly raising questions about an individual’s life story and the right to tell it, this case also addresses issues of repressive governments, especially those involving religious ideology, and disagreements between nations over how historical events are to be remembered and accounted for.
Narcissists are persuasive speakers but terrible writers, study finds
New research results “published in the Journal of Research in Personality, reveal that the persuasive abilities of self-centered individuals depend heavily on the way they communicate.” Such individuals may appear charismatic and convincing when speaking in public but are much less impressive in writing, when readers have time to “focus heavily on the logical flow and the actual strength of the arguments presented.”
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
