Book Recommendations

Monday Miscellany

Robert McCloskey Sketches for “Make Way for Ducklings” Born in 1914 in Hamilton, Ohio, Robert McCloskey came to Boston to attend the now-defunct Vesper George Art School. He left to live in New York for a time and established a career as an author and illustrator in the late 1930s. Over the years, he became […]

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Best Books of 2013 | Publishers Weekly

There’s no denying that the state of the world is reflected in our favorite books of 2013. Among our top 10 are narratives that range from the war on terror to a middle Eastern country in the iron grip of a dictator to hard times much closer to home. In others, history — factual, or

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Monday Miscellany: Big Literary News Edition

Meet Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The big literary news of last week was the announcement of Canadian writer Alice Munro as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro is generally considered to be the current master of the short-fiction form. The announcement generated a lot of articles about Munro’s

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Monday Miscellany

Why GR’s new review rules are censorship – Some thoughts Late Friday (US time) Goodreads announced a change in review and shelving policy, and immediately started deleting readers’ reviews and shelves. In doing this they became censors. Limiting readers’ ability to discuss the cultural context of a book is censorship designed to promote authors’ interests.

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Monday Miscellany

11 Required Reading Books You Should Re-Read Now That You’re Older Madeleine Crum thinks you’d benefit from rereading these books that you were probably required to struggle through in English classes while growing up. I have actually reread several of these in recent years, and I agree with her assessment that they have much more

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Monday Miscellany

17 Most Screwed Up Relationships In Books From Oedipus and Jocasta to Anastasia and Christian Grey, here are the most dysfunctional book couples. Trust us, these people will make you feel good about your worst relationship. To which list I would add those kids from Flowers in the Attic. 20 Of The Biggest Dick Moves

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15 Novels That Stretched My Knowledge

I keep finding book lists on the internet with titles like “Books That Will Change Your Life” and “Books That Will Influence Your Thinking.” So here’s my list (in no special order): 15 Novels That Stretched My Knowledge and Stayed With Me Long After I’d Read Them. What novels would make your list? Let us

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Monday Miscellany

Little Libertarians on the prairie Christine Woodside argues that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, journalist Rose Wilder Lane, edited her mother’s reminiscences into books that project a Libertarian point of view: A close examination of the Wilder family papers suggests that Wilder’s daughter did far more than transcribe her mother’s pioneer tales: She shaped them and

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Monday Miscellany

Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part. Reading IS the Part. The digital revolution has contributed to the dramatic rise in audiobooks: Once a small backwater of the publishing industry, in part because of the cumbersome nature of tapes, audiobooks are now flourishing. Sales have been rising by double digits annually in recent years.

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Monday Miscellany

The top 10 classic spy novels From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage “So my selection of novels reflects the interests of a historian, and draws on both domestic and foreign espionage. They are “classics” in being of some antiquity, and

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