For July we start with a book that everyone’s talking about – Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. According to Goodreads, in this currently popular novel “A traditional American woman, a ‘tradwife’ influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855.” first degree Like Natalie Heller Mills of Yesteryear, Billy Pilgrim of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five […]
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How America Gave Up on Its Own History “Unable to agree on how to interpret the American story, the country’s schools, universities, and political institutions have stopped trying to tell it at all.” Just as individuals construct stories that assert their identity, so do other social and political groups, including nations. Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive
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The Rise of Ragebait Lit “This spring, arguing about books in the group chat is back” In Harper’s Bazaar, Maris Kreizman discusses the predominance of “ragebait lit,” books that “are dominating the cultural conversation.” “The premises of these books may have inspired more than their share of hot takes . . . but the conversations
15 Graduation Gifts for English Majors “WHAT TO GET THE SOON-TO-BE BARISTA IN YOUR LIFE” “If you happen to have a favorite English major about to burst forth into the hard-scrabble, AI-invested, job-scarce media apocalypse” and are searching for an appropriate gift, Literary Hub has some suggestions. Prices range from $18 to $1,550. (Of course,
June’s challenge starts with a book by Austrian author Stefan Zweig – The Post-Office Girl. first degree We English-speaking readers must access The Post-Office Girl in translation. I’ve recently added another translated work to my TBR list, Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel by Shuang-zi Yang, translated by Lin King, 2026 winner of the International Booker Prize.
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Do We Think Too Much About the Future? “For most of history, people didn’t try predicting it. Maybe that was wise.” One feature of life story psychology is the concept of life review, a tendency to think about the future in terms of what our lives mean and what we want to leave as a legacy.
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What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? Kelsey Rexroat, a writer and editor from San Francisco, talked with people who read 100 or more books in a year, “people for whom reading is not a hobby so much as a way of moving through the world.” She identifies five patterns among such “super-readers.” I found
The Summer Reading Guide If you’re still drawing up your summer reading plan, The Atlantic has 25 recommendations for books in the following categories: What Close Reading Can Reveal About an Author’s Intentions I was always taught that we cannot know what an author intended to do; we can only see what an author has
In Praise of Chick Lit: The Genre’s All-Stars Talk to Vanity Fair “As The Devil Wears Prada 2 dominates, it’s time to give these best-selling, much-maligned books about single women in the big city their due—with help from Plum Sykes and Jennifer Weiner.” I don’t like the term chick lit; nonetheless, I’ll have to live
This month’s stating point is Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent. In this novel we get to know Sybil Van Antwerp from her 73rd birthday until her death about 10 years later. first degree One of the people to whom Sybil writes is author Joan Didion. In an example of synchronicity, the book I read
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