New Report Explores ‘Engagement’ with Books, Digital Media
A new report released this week is being billed as the first study to capture critical data about how consumers “engage” with books within a “connected media ecosystem” that includes video games, TV, and movies.
According to Publishers Weekly, “The study’s focus on consumer ‘engagement’ with books—vs. ‘reading’ behaviors—is a key distinction” because “Engagement with books can run the gamut, researchers found, including people who check out materials from the library but don’t always read or watch them, people who give books as gifts, buy them to collect or display, and people who dip into a book for reference, whether for work, school, or a hobby.”
Reviewing the Book Review
The New York Times engages in self-examination: “As the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, delves into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full.”
Sehgal looks at lots of issues that range from the language or style of writing to the publication’s lack of diversity in what gets covered and what doesn’t.
Literature Should Be Taught Like Science
“This renegade professor says literature is a machine that accelerates the human brain.”
They had me at “renegade professor.” Keven Berger, editor of science magazine Nautilus, talks with Angus Fletcher, an English professor at Ohio State University, about his new book, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Fletcher got an undergraduate degree in neuroscience before realizing that “the biology of the brain wouldn’t take him far enough toward understanding our need for stories.”
Why New Fiction Is Making Mothers into Monsters
“Novels and short stories are leveraging horror elements to express how dehumanizing motherhood can be”
Rachel Mans McKenny, novelist and essayist, explains how “Horror interlaced with the already-fantastic can teach us clear lessons about how little women are allowed to want in motherhood.”
The best books on Narrative Nonfiction
Since I read mostly fiction, I don’t discuss nonfiction often enough. Here author Samira Shackle defines and discusses narrative fiction: “Narrative nonfiction is a style of writing that takes the facts and dramatises them to create novelistic retellings of real life events.”
See what she has to say about five of the best recent works of narrative nonfiction.
What Happens When a Publisher Becomes a Megapublisher?
“The merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster has the potential to touch every part of the industry, including how much authors get paid and how bookstores are run.”
Jonathan Lethem: Why Shirley Jackson is a Reader’s Writer
“On the Brilliance of We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the Intimacy of Everyday Evil”
Shirley Jackson, writes novelist Jonathan Lethem, has “been no major critic’s fetish.”
Rather, Shirley Jackson has thrived, at publication and since, as a reader’s writer. Her most famous works—“The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House—are more famous than her name, and have sunk into cultural memory as timeless artifacts, seeming older than they are, with the resonance of myth or archetype.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
