New Report Explores ‘Engagement’ with Books, Digital Media A new report released this week is being billed as the first study to capture critical data about how consumers “engage” with books within a “connected media ecosystem” that includes video games, TV, and movies. According to Publishers Weekly, “The study’s focus on consumer ‘engagement’ with books—vs. […]
How to Read a Book, According to Virginia Woolf Ellen Gutoskey discusses Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” Gutoskey begins by noting that the title is a question, not a prescriptive statement: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your
My husband and I both got our second dose of COVID-19 vaccine yesterday. I’ve waited to post in case either of us experienced any of the reactions to the second shot that I’ve been reading about. Last night we each had a very slight bit of soreness in our arm, but that had disappeared by
Writers’ Inner Voices Many writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ the voices of the characters they create and having characters who talk back to them, rebel, and ‘do their own thing’. It’s an experience described by a wide range of authors from Enid Blyton, Alice Walker, Quentin Tarantino and Charles Dickens through to Samuel Beckett,
We don’t get much snow, except for occasional flurries, here near sea level on the coast of Washington. So when a storm hits, we make the most of it. Yesterday afternoon through this afternoon we got about 10 inches, which is quite a lot for this area. The Seattle Weather Blog noted that 8.9 inches
A Sickness in the Air “Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.” [Alam] has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class: fashion houses, just-trendy-enough restaurants, interiors detailed with the loving eye of a copywriter for a high-end furniture catalog.
This month we start with Anne Tyler’s latest novel, Redhead By the Side of the Road, which Goodreads describes as the story of Micah Mortimer, “a creature of habit” who lives a “meticulously organized life.” I have not read this novel, but I have read several of Tyler’s earlier books. I always think of her
6 Degrees of Separation: What’s in a Title? Read More »
Happy Groundhog Day! I came across this list of time-loop books to celebrate with and felt it my duty to share it with you: 13 Great Time Loop Books to Read This Groundhog Day I’ve read three of these books: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
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What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction’? Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College and soon-to-debut novelist, wonders why World Cat “(the biggest library search engine on the planet)” has classified her upcoming novel, Madrid Again, as domestic fiction: Why would my novel, about an itinerant bilingual mother and daughter who
Using Neuroscience to Understand Reading Slumps Joshua C. Craig, who spent an undergraduate year studying neuroscience, read up on the scientific literature to see what the current thinking is on the subject of reading slumps. He does a good job of making the subject accessible for those of us without a hefty science background. A
