Start you week off right, with some book-related reading. 10 reasons we still love J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ Here’s a list to warm you up for the December 21 opening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson’s film adaptation (Part 1) of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel. A Short Defense of Literary Excess Novelist Ben […]
Here’s some reading to start off your week. Five Smarter Ways to Nurture Reading Sari Harrar has suggestions, based on recent research, for helping children learn to read and to enjoy reading. This one is my favorite: Link the story to their lives. Pause when you read and ask kids how the story connects to their
This week’s links. Did You Just Pay Too Much for That eBook? If you own any kind of ereader (Kindle, Nook, iPad or other tablet, Kobo), you must read this article by Shannon Rupp. When she goes in search of a novel published in 1924, this is what she found: So as a consumer on
Here’s what I’ve been reading this week: Why the Best Mysteries Are Written in English From the pen of Otto Penzler: It is an inarguable fact that virtually everything of interest and significance in the history of detective fiction has been written in the English language, mainly by American and English authors. This is not
The Heroine in the Drawing Room Cynthia Crossen, books columnist for the Wall Street Journal, contemplates the meaning of the phrase domestic fiction, a genre often sneered at: Domestic fiction, like all literary genres, can be bad, and bad in an especially cloying, attenuated and dreary way. I call bad domestic novels Hallmark fiction, and
I finally got around to watching the film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2012), based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same title. Our book group read the novel several years ago and loved it, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film adaptation. The story involves 10-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father died
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Here’s what caught my eye over the past week: ‘I Am The Cheese’: A Nightmarish Nail-Biter: The most chilling book I’ve ever read is Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese. In this piece, which is almost as compelling as the novel itself, author Ben Marcus remembers how reading the book affected him as a 12-year-old
55 years later, Kerouac novel finally is a movie | The Columbia Daily Tribune – Columbia, Missouri Fifty-five years after its publication, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” finally is burning on the big screen. Marlon Brando, Jean-Luc Godard and Brad Pitt have all circled the classic 1957 novel over the past six decades, but Walter
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The Truth Versus Twilight This site, a collaboration between the Burke Museum and the Quileute Tribe, aims to set the record straight about the culture that forms the backdrop for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Made famous by the recent pop-culture phenomenon Twilight, the Quileute people have found themselves thrust into the global spotlight. Their reservation,
Why teens should read ‘adult’ fiction – and vice-versa Sheila Heti doesn’t understand why so many adults are reading YA (young adult) literature such as The Hunger Games: What surprises me most about YA books is not that adults are reading them in mass numbers (as with Hunger Games appearing on bestseller lists everywhere); it’s
