Because I was having trouble cranking up much enthusiasm for Halloween this year, here’s a collection of items I’ve collected. I hope you’ll find something here to help you get into this weekend’s holiday spirit. Read What You Need: 9 Gothic Novels for Every Mood This is the one that first inspired me. Did you […]
The Best Time Travel Books Annalee Newitz is both a science journalist and a science fiction writer who uses science to spur investigations into the nature of human existence. Newitz says science fiction is “less teaching people about how science works, and more about teaching people how history works.” Newitz uses the version of time
Introduction Ever since I started Notes in the Margin back in the late 1990s, I’ve been saying that I don’t like, and therefore don’t read, horror literature, particularly books about vampires, werewolves, and zombies. However, lately I’ve read several articles about horror that have convinced me it might be time for me to re-examine my
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Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times” Thirty years ago Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, a book in which she introduced the notion of gender as performance. The book has since become “a foundational text on any gender studies reading list,” and the question of whether gender is how
I hate the phrase “post-truth era,” but truly we’ve stopped agreeing that there is such a thing as truth and that some things are truthful and some things are facts and it’s not a matter of opinion. Opinion is one thing that’s very different from truth and, unless we all can agree that at least
Quotation: In a “Post-Truth Era” Read More »
One of the reasons why we read is to practice life, to look at particular circumstances and wonder what we’d do if we found ourselves in them. For example, I don’t think I’d ever kidnap a child. But what if someone called me and told me she had kidnapped my daughter, and to get my
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How the Pandemic Has Changed Our Reading Lives “Many of the readers who have more reading time are finding that the mental toll of current events is hurting their attention spans, or seeing their genre preferences shift and twist.” Leah Rachel von Essen “talked to authors, book bloggers, librarians, and general readers to investigate how
14 of the Scariest Books Ever Written Halloween reading season is upon us. Leila Siddiqui, declaring that “as readers, we love the sensation of being scared—it is adrenaline-inducing and addictive,” offers her list of reading material for the season. THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED THE PAST 100 YEARS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE This article from Smithsonian Magazine
This month we start with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, an appropriate choice for the Halloween season because it features ghosts. Or does it? The most salient feature of James’s novella is its ambiguity. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they the product of some psychological projection such as
6 Degrees of Separation: Ghosts! Read More »
Every September, I look over the new list and sigh, “How could anyone object to these great-looking books?” This year, instead of just sighing, I read all the books. The experience introduced me to some great new titles and, by implication, the anxieties of too many censorial Americans. Source: For Banned Books Week, I read
