See What the World’s Reading Habits Look Like in 2020
The editing and proofreading service Global English Editing gathered statistics from various sources, including Pew Research and Amazon’s bestsellers page, that demonstrate how the world’s reading habits changed over the course of 2020: “35 percent of web users worldwide reported reading more during the pandemic, and 14 percent said they read significantly more. This trend was most dramatic in China, where 44 percent of respondents said they increased their reading time due to the coronavirus.”
The Lockdown Lessons of “Crime and Punishment”
At the age of 76 in the fall of 2019, David Denby enrolled in Columbia University’s required year-long freshman course called Literary Humanities. The class began discussing Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in April 2020, after the campus had been shut down for four weeks.
Here Denby discusses his experience with studying Dostoyevsky’s novel on a computer screen rather than around a seminar table and how the novel’s ideas resonate in today’s reality.
Why Narrative Structure Is One of the Crime Writer’s Most Valuable Tools
How writers manipulate narrative structure for novelistic effects fascinates me so much that I’ve written a couple of posts about it:
- How Narrative Structure Works in Fiction and How It Differs from Plot
- 5 Novels With Unusual Narrative Structures
So I was delighted to come across author Sara Foster’s discussion of how she and others have used it in their works. Read her explanations here of how particular novelistic techniques can affect a story’s meaning and impact.
The Limits of the Viral Book Review
“Why are literary critics fixating on one quality nowadays?”
That one particular quality, Larissa Pham writes, is self-awareness.
As a recent wave of literary criticism seems to demonstrate, this self-awareness falls neatly along political lines: Even within their texts, authors find themselves in the position of navigating their privilege, some of which very well might have helped land them the book deal.
So You’re (Still) in a Pandemic Reading Slump
A lot of us have had trouble, either periodically or continuously, concentrating enough to read since COVID-19 emerged last spring. I wrote about my own such problems here.
In this article article Danika Ellis offers six approaches you might take if you’re still having trouble settling back into a reading routine.
© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown
