Literary Links

Books Aren’t Mental Movies: You’re Missing the Best Part of Reading

BookRiot writer Danika Ellis caught my attention with this opening paragraph:

Sometimes, when people describe what they love about reading, it feels like we’re doing two very different activities. They talk about a movie playing out in their mind’s eye as they read, imagined in lush detail. They associate characters with certain actors. It’s like a film you direct yourself, apparently. And that puzzles me, because I don’t picture anything when I read.

Me, too! When I read a novel, I don’t mentally associate the characters with particular actors. Frequently, when I see an actor who absolutely nails a character in a movie, I’ll think “nobody else could have played that role so well.” But that’s hindsight. It doesn’t happen, for me, in the other direction.

I don’t see novels cinematically playing out in my head. My experience of reading is more like Ellis’s: “I experience books as nothing but language and meaning: no sounds, no images.”

How about you? Do you see movies in your mind’s eye when you read? I’d love to read about your experiences in the comments below. There is no right or wrong answer here, so don’t be afraid to speak up.

Verifying facts in the age of AI – librarians offer 5 strategies

Three “library scientists” (librarians and professors) from Boise State University offer “a number of ways to validate the accuracy of an article” found online. Back in the early 1970s, when I was teaching research skills to college freshmen and sophomores, we called these techniques critical thinking skills, but they’ve become way more important in the internet age.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

“To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.”

“Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books,” writes Rose Horowitch. The reason is that middle and high schools have largely stopped asking students to read complete books, relying instead on excerpts, poetry, and news articles as course materials.

Francis Ford Coppola on Books That Influenced “Megalopolis”

“The legendary director talks about his wide-ranging reading taste, and some of the books that informed his latest film, which stars Adam Driver as a visionary polymath.”

I haven’t seen this film, which The New Yorker describes as “Francis Ford Coppola’s four-decades-in-the-making epic of a decadent society.” However, I’m interested in the cross-pollination of various forms of popular culture, especially between books and visual media of film and television. Here, director Coppola discusses some of the books that influenced his latest work.

20 Notoriously Underrated Writers You Should Be Reading

I dislike titles that presume to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, but when I put those feelings aside I sometimes find useful information in the articles.  Here Emily Temple, after consultation with “critics, writers, and journalists who have, at one time or another, deemed an an author underrated, underappreciated, or otherwise unfairly ignored,” curates a list of writers whose work probably merits more attention than it has gotten in the past.

How Mountaineers Books built a publishing empire from a textbook

Gregory Scruggs describes for the Seattle Times how a local publisher found a niche and built upon it.

How Historical Fiction Redefined the Literary Canon

“In contemporary publishing, novels fixated on the past rather than the present have garnered the most attention and prestige.”

Alexander Manshel, associate professor of English at McGill University, writes, “over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past.”

Between 1950 and about 1980, he continues, most of the works “short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award then were mostly about contemporary life.” But that’s no longer the case: “A historical novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 12 out of the last 15 years, and historical fiction has made up 70 percent of all novels short-listed for these three major American prizes since the turn of the 21st century.”

Manshel examines how this change came about and what it says about the state of contemporary society.

Self-Diagnosis Is Making Memoir Too Predictable

“The joy of reading memoir is to watch another mind puzzle through its inner mechanics. If the outcome is already decided, why bother?”

Tajja Isen addresses the question of whether writing constitutes a form of therapy and how that belief can shape the completed written work: “there’s a difference between creative work conferring self-knowledge on a par with psychiatric insight and structuring that work to shore up the psychiatric diagnosis or breakthrough.” 

Isen considers a number of published memoirs, writing books, and critical works in her process of assessment.

8 Haunting Appalachian and Southern Gothic Novels

It’s not too early to start your Halloween reading.

Historical Fiction Set in the 1960s

Because I came of age in the 1960s, I have a special place in my heart for fiction set during that time. And the page includes a bonus offering: a link to a list of bestsellers from the 1960s.

© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown