Being on a cruise ship gave me the opportunity to have probably the best reading month of my life: 10 books: 8 novels + 2 works of nonfiction. Let the reviews begin! I put this novel on my Kindle because I thought Dave’s 2021 mystery The Last Thing He Told Me was so good: “By repeatedly […]
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Writing About Yourself Isn’t Inherently Selfish Novelist Tope Folarin examines the work of French novelist Édouard Louis. But first, Folarin quotes from The Good Story, a 2015 book by the Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, co-authored with Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist. Folarin calls The Good Story “a searching, erudite treatise about the stories
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25 Books Your High School English Teacher Was Right to Assign Veronica Booth, a lifestyle and culture writer from Boston, MA, explains that “reading important literary works at a young age can shape your perspective of the world, your empathy toward others, and your beliefs.” Her list of books that underscore her point includes The
How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s America “In the start of a new series reflecting on 75 years of the awards, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how societies and juries read and recognize literature” The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the
The Secrets of Suspense “We love churning apprehension in fiction; we hate it in life. But understanding the most fundamental technique of storytelling can teach us something about being alive.” Kathryn Schulz explains the nature of suspense, the process of “making the audience want to know what happens next.” Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks Benjamin Hedin,
How Pants Went From Banned to Required in the Roman Empire “Six hundred years in the history of trousers.” One of the most obvious functions of culture is the creation of customs about how people should or should not dress. Here Vittoria Traverso examines how, in ancient Rome, men’s wearing of pants gradually morphed from
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Related Posts: All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda © 2016 Date read: 4/17/2017 Like Drowning Ruth, this novel demonstrates yet another way narrative structure can work to build suspense and meaning. Here the protagonist must come to terms with an event that happened earlier in her life. The only way she can unravel past
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Against the objectification of books (or, some thoughts on The Discourse). Brittany Allen addresses the tendency of readers who brag about how fast they read and how very many books they read in a given amount of time. (Examples of this trend most often pop up in those end-of-year reading statistics that Goodreads reports.) “Why
Discover the Top Edgar® Award-Winning Mysteries of 2024 One of the flagship productions of PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) is MASTERPIECE Mystery! It’s therefore not surprising that PBS recommends that we consider adding to our summer reading lists the books that won this year’s Edgar Awards. American Writers Festival Ultimate Reading List Next Sunday,
Related Posts: #9 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn © 2012 Date read: 7/10/2012 I read this book the year after I got my psychology degree focusing on life stories. Life story writing is nonfiction, but in Gone Girl I immediately realized that Flynn uses life story elements to build the characterization of her two main
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