We Need Diverse Books Launches #BooksSaveLives Initiative Against Censorship We Need Diverse Books, an organization formed in 2014 “to advocate for diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry,” has launched its #BooksSaveLives initiative with “as much as $10,000 in grants to schools and libraries in underserved communities so they can purchase challenged and banned books […]
Today is a freebie for Top Ten Tuesday. If you’re now in a rush to knock off your reading goal for 2022, I’m here to help you out with this list of books you can read in one day or less. © 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown
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Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books?
On the End of the Canon Wars This think piece by John Michael Colón examines the question of whether and, if so, how a “liberal education” (which really means study across the humanities) benefits students. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literature & Culture, Reading A dinosaur is a story “in science as in fiction, the
The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions Novelist and critic Naomi Kanakia, who belongs to two book clubs, uses the context of her book group discussions to examine why we read fiction. The point of novels, she writes, “is that something happened. Something was at stake in this story. Characters made decisions. Those decisions had consequences.
Related Post: 5 Series I Want to Catch Up On V.I. Warshawski novels by Sara Paretsky Child psychologist Alex Delaware series by Jonathan Kellerman Psychologist Alan Gregory novels by Stephen White Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series by Val McDermid Olive Kitteridge books by Elizabeth Strout 5 Series I Want to Start IQ books by Joe Ide
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PEN America Rejects Calls to Cancel Coney Barrett Book Last week’s Literary Links included an article about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book advance as well as an article about PEN America’s report on diversity in the publishing industry. This week we have a link to Publishers Weekly’s news that PEN America has condemned the
Introduction I had all sorts of good intentions to read more nonfiction during 2022, but here it is November and, according to my spreadsheet, I’ve read exactly one nonfiction work all year (a memoir that wasn’t very good and that I therefore didn’t review). I like alliteration and have heard of Nonfiction November, so I
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Book Banners Are Weaponizing Legitimate Resources: Book Censorship News, October 28, 2022 Danika Ellis writes, “One of the strategies book banners are using that makes me nervous is that they are weaponizing resources that were never meant to defend book banning.” She’s particularly concerned about “resources that were specifically made to help teachers and parents
How Do the Books We Read Change Our Brains? “Gregory Berns on Measuring the Effects of a Really Good Story” In this article, adapted from his book The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities, Emory University psychology professor Gregory Berns describes a neuroimaging experiment he devised to measure whether reading
