The best book I read this month is Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Here are the other two. When you’ve been in the writing business as long as I have, the one thing you need to constantly search for are stories that will challenge you as a novelist . . . This is probably the most
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My last read of the year turned out to be one of the best books I read in 2025. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan is my favorite kind of novel: old-fashioned storytelling from an omniscient narrator, a multi-generational family saga that follows characters over the courses of their lives. Ryan sets his novel in the fictional
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Record everything! “Our memories are precious to us and constitute our sense of self. Why not enhance them by recording all of your life?” Yannic Kappes is a philosopher and a postdoc at the University of Vienna in Austria. In this article he takes the proposition that “[c]urrent technology allows for radical memory enhancement” to
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The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait The powers that be at Oxford University Press have chosen rage bait as their word of the year for 2025. Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to
Related Post: In addition to three works of nonfiction, I also listened to two novels this month. We learn about humanity from stories of individual lives. In A Calamity of Souls David Baldacci introduced us to two people fighting for civil rights during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The historical novel Strangers in
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What’s Real and What’s Not: Gish Jen on Writing Between the Factual Lines “Finding the sweet spot between memoir and fiction” Writer Gish Jen considers writing situations that fall somewhere between memoir—or nonfiction—and fiction: “Might the author hope that his or her account, to whatever genre it belongs, will move the reader in a way
The Best Literary Love Stories A satisfying literary love story doesn’t need to end happily ever after—but one does need to be left with a sense that two characters belong together, advises the novelist Lily King . . . Thomas Mallon’s Theory of the Diary “The New York writer and editor’s diaries of the AIDS
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
Thanks to book blogger Kate for once again sponsoring 6 Degrees of Separation. This month we begin with the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu. Description from Goodreads: Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a
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What’s Happening to Reading? “For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.” “What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated?” asks Joshua Rothman in this article in The New Yorker. He examines how new technology such as ereaders and artificial intelligence have changed and will continue
