‘God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad “I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors,” writes Lauren Oyler. In this piece, another chapter in the continuous Goodreads controversy, she states that […]
I loved this fantasy, a coming-of-age tale based on an epic search for lost love, a place to call home, and the power of stories. We first meet the protagonist, January Scaller, at the beginning of the 20th century, when she’s seven years old. She lives with a guardian: Mr. William Cornelius Locke, self-made not-quite-billionaire,
Review: ”The Ten Thousand Doors of January” Read More »
Happy New Year! Welcome to the first blog post of the year! NaJoWriMo Journal Writing Challenge Starts January 1st I know a lot of book bloggers are also writers. Many participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, every November. Since I don’t write fiction, I’ve always been a little jealous. But, if you write in
Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books?
The Queen of arts: Elizabeth II in fiction “It wasn’t until 1988 that the Queen began to make appearances in fiction, but since then she’s had many, largely sympathetic portrayals” Categories: Fiction, Literary History How Will Overturning of Roe v. Wade Influence Book Trends? “Without Roe v. Wade, we probably never would have gotten the
10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) Gizmodo Australia: We asked some of our favourite writers, and they told us the 10 classic books that everyone pretends to have read, and why you should actually read them. From Asimov to Pynchon, science fiction contains some fantastic, ambitious works
Viewing Literature as a Lab for Community Ethics The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront many bioethical questions, such as, when resources are limited, which lives should be saved and which sacrificed? Maren Tova Linett, author of Literary Bioethics, argues that fiction, with its ability to present imagined worlds, offers the chance to explore
Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers Joe Pinsker looks at the question of “why some people grow up to derive great pleasure from reading, while others don’t.” Here’s no surprise: “a chief factor seems to be the household one is born into, and the culture of reading that parents create within it.” How Reese Witherspoon
