How Reading Ebooks Changes Our Perception (and Reviews) Addison Rizer, a self-declared “avid Kindle reader,” writes, “I am curious about the ways reading ebooks changes the way we interact, and review, the novels we consume.” The article contains lots of references, with links, to both scientific studies and popular sources. However, the discussion is unfocused; […]
How to Read a Book, According to Virginia Woolf Ellen Gutoskey discusses Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” Gutoskey begins by noting that the title is a question, not a prescriptive statement: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your
Writers’ Inner Voices Many writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ the voices of the characters they create and having characters who talk back to them, rebel, and ‘do their own thing’. It’s an experience described by a wide range of authors from Enid Blyton, Alice Walker, Quentin Tarantino and Charles Dickens through to Samuel Beckett,
A Sickness in the Air “Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.” [Alam] has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class: fashion houses, just-trendy-enough restaurants, interiors detailed with the loving eye of a copywriter for a high-end furniture catalog.
What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction’? Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College and soon-to-debut novelist, wonders why World Cat “(the biggest library search engine on the planet)” has classified her upcoming novel, Madrid Again, as domestic fiction: Why would my novel, about an itinerant bilingual mother and daughter who
Using Neuroscience to Understand Reading Slumps Joshua C. Craig, who spent an undergraduate year studying neuroscience, read up on the scientific literature to see what the current thinking is on the subject of reading slumps. He does a good job of making the subject accessible for those of us without a hefty science background. A
TIMES NEW ROMAN, ARIAL, AND HELVETICA: THE FONT FAVORITES, BUT WHY? Melissa Baron looks into why, with hundreds of thousands of fonts in existence, Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica have become :the most widely used fonts ever.” Old Novels as Therapy “In these incredibly dark days, I’ve found solace talking to people I’ve known
Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing “How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.” Lydia Wilson explains how writing developed from a system to record the ownership of particular goods to one capable of creating great works of literature. Turning the Page on the Year “If ever there were a
Overlooked No More: Clarice Lispector, Novelist Who Captivated Brazil “Critics lauded her stream-of-consciousness style and described her as glamorous and mysterious. But she didn’t always welcome the attention she received.” “This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.” From the
Book Club Spotlight: How This 20-Year-Old Book Club Connects Virtually The group of 15 ladies successfully transitioned from over 20 years of dinner and monthly meetings at the Rancho Santa Margarita City Hall to a virtual format — and were even able to welcome back a few members! Most recently, the club held its annual
