Could reading dark literature harm your teenage children?
This isn’t a new question, but this answer is fairly well balanced, with discussion from scientists for both sides of the issue.
Judy Blume: ’I thought, this is America: we don’t ban books. But then we did’
A delightful interview with Judy Blume, who has her own ideas about why her books are so often challenged:
Blume’s theory is that children read over what they aren’t yet ready to understand. Sometimes, she says, “kids will actually go to Mom or Dad and say ‘What does this mean?’, which is the perfect time to talk to them about it. But that’s when sometimes parents get hysterical. Really. It’s like, ‘Argh, I don’t want to talk to you about this, let’s get rid of this book, I don’t ever want to talk to you about this, I don’t ever want you to go through puberty.’”
Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed
From household names to deeply obscure scribblers, authors are inflamed this summer, perhaps more deeply divided than at any point in nearly a half-century. Back then, it was the question of being a hawk or dove on Vietnam. Now it is not a war but an Internet retailer and its unparalleled grip on the cultural machinery that is provoking fierce controversy.
If you’re wondering about the details of this controversy between authors and Amazon, here’s a refresher course.
The Best Books of 2014 So Far
A list of 36 titles put together by Brenna Clarke Gray at Book Riot.
But the article asks readers to add their favorites in the comments, so be sure to look there.
Are modern detectives the new priests?
I like mysteries because the best ones explore the depths of the human psyche without being too preachy.
In this article Giles Fraser looks at the functions of mystery writing with specific reference to HBO’s recent hit show True Detective:
The modern secular imagination prides itself on having got beyond the childish ways of historical theology. But our continued obsession with detective fiction suggests something remarkably adjacent to traditional theological concerns, and its lonely, world-weary hard-drinking advocates – think Luther – have become the priests and theologians of our day. Yes, there are obviously religious detectives – the BBC’s Father Brown, Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael character – but they can be seen as seeking (unconvincingly, perhaps) to reclaim something of this new priestly ministry for more traditional ideological purposes.
Sci-Fi’s Best ‘Alien’ Narrators Who Restore Our Humanity
Matt Haig is the author of the novel The Humans, in which an alien inhabits the body of a human mathematician to destroy his ground-breaking theory. But the alien soon becomes fascinated by the everyday lives of humans.
Here Haig writes:
The best science fiction writers use the genre not to escape human life, but to explore it. Sometimes the most illuminating way to examine ourselves is to look at us from a different perspective: an alien narrator, for instance, or a human narrator placed in an inhuman environment, where humans are scarce, dwindling or totally non-existent. Here are my favorite books that get close to us, by losing us.
See his list of four novels that best use the literary device of an alien narrator to explore the nature of human existence.
