Instead of laying out an elaborate reading and blogging plan for 2024, I’m going to tell you what I’ll be focusing on. It seems that, at the end of every year, I look back on whatever reading and writing goals I had set at the beginning of the year and document, in excruciating detail, how […]
What Notes in the Margin Will Be Up to This Year Read More »
Introducing the 2024 Reading Log! I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read since May 1, 1991, when we got our first computer. I started with a database program, but, over that many years, software has changed multiple times. Every time a program would bite the dust, I’d export my data, then import it
Related Posts: 5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World “How habits of speech can shape our thoughts.” Language is the most prominent social construct of all; humans develop language to communicate with each other about how they experience the world and their place in it. Claire Cameron explains “the primary way
Life Stories in Literature: Links Read More »
The Hours at 25: The book that changed how we see Virginia Woolf The 2002 film version of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours “has come to define the popular image of Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century,” writes Lillian Crawford. The Hours is “a modern reinterpretation of Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway.” Crawford explains how
Seven Books for the Lifelong Learner Chelsea Leu suggests seven books that “describe the experience of becoming absorbed by a skill or craft, and deliver insights into what mundane activities—say, playing sports or learning a foreign language—can tell us about how we live today. Look closely enough at any human endeavor, these books suggest, and
Levelling up: how Gabrielle Zevin’s gaming novel became the book of the summer I was gratified to read about the popularity in the U.K. of My Most Surprising Read of 2022. Categories: Author News, Book News, Fiction Negative capability “When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness
Thermo Fisher Scientific settles with family of Henrietta Lacks, whose HeLa cells uphold medicine Social justice achieved by a book! See The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Categories: Author News New England Noir: A Brief, Idiosyncratic History of a Literary Region The region is known for its literary output: six states, a
The Writers Who Went Undercover to Show America Its Ugly Side “In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar America.” A history lesson from The Atlantic: In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread
How the Essay and the Novel Inform and Influence Each Other Here’s an excerpt from Jane Smiley’s recently published collection of essays, The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom (Heyday Books, 2023): Most of the essays in this book have been assignments—I am handed a topic and asked to reveal
