Fiction

woman reading

On Reading

35 books everyone should read at least once in their lifetime This article arose from a question posed on Reddit: “What is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?” Of the top 35 books listed here from the Reddit responses, I have read the following: Zen and the Art […]

On Reading Read More »

The Classics Club

Rereading “Caddie Woodlawn” by Carol Ryrie Brink

Brink, Carol Ryrie. Caddie Woodlawn Original publication date: 1935 rpt. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007 eISBN 978–1–4424–6858–0 Part of the charm of rereading, as an adult, books that I read as a child is understanding and appreciating how I must have reacted to the books back then. I didn’t remember much about Caddie Woodlawn

Rereading “Caddie Woodlawn” by Carol Ryrie Brink Read More »

woman reading

On Reading

Reading With Imagination Novelist Lily Tuck calls fiction a creative act, “an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.” Here’s how she hopes people will read her work: In my own writing, I have been accused of (or is it praised for?) being a minimalist, which I suppose

On Reading Read More »

The Classics Club

The Classics Spin #9

It’s time for The Classics Spin #9. For this exercise, Classics Club readers are to make a numbered list of 20 unread books on their original reading list. Then next Monday, April 6, the club will announce a number between 1 and 20, and by May 15 we are to read the book with that number

The Classics Spin #9 Read More »

On Novels and Novelists

On Novels and Novelists

Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature – and Ian Rankin proves it On the occasion of Ian Rankin’s becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Allan Massie discusses the author of the John Rebus novels and crime fiction in general. Massie bets that having been “received into Scotland’s intellectual elite

On Novels and Novelists Read More »

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Review: “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio Original publication date: 1919 Rpt. New York: Random House, 1947 Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, is a collection of 23 interrelated sketches—Anderson calls them “tales”—that portray life in a Midwestern town in the early years of the twentieth century. The unifying thread throughout is the coming-of-age story of George Willard, an

Review: “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson Read More »

The Classics Club

On Rereading “Anne of Green Gables”

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables Original publication date: 1908 Like most young girl characters who appear in books written for girls, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables functions for readers as a model of how to be a successful girl. These books communicate and reinforce to children the beliefs and behaviors that

On Rereading “Anne of Green Gables” Read More »

On Novels and Novelists

On Novels and Novelists

Julianne Moore on Forging a Bond With Alzheimer’s Patients Cara Buckley reports on how Julianne Moore prepared for her role in the film of Still Alice, a performance that won her an Oscar for best actress. Moore played Alice Howland, a Harvard cognifive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. (Early-onset Alzheimer’s is defined as onset before

On Novels and Novelists Read More »

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Reading in Flow

Related Posts: Flow Getting Lost in a Good Book: Scientific Research on Reading Flow and the Reading Process If you’ve ever had the experience of getting lost in a good book, you’ve experienced flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s general characteristics of flow describe this experience. The key to flow is complete absorption in an activity. For readers, the

Reading in Flow Read More »

On Novels and Novelists

Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler

Man in Hole: Turning novels’ plots into data points Dan Piepenbring reports for The Paris Review on an example of digital humanities, or the application of big-data crunching to literary analysis: Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who’s been studying what he calls “the relationship between sentiment

Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler Read More »

Scroll to Top