Most readers of Jane Austen name Pride and Prejudice as their favorite of her novels. But my favorite has always been Emma. I don’t remember whether Emma was the first Austen novel I read, but I do remember that it was the first novel that, when I had finished, I went back to the beginning […]
“Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s” Read More »
If you enjoyed a good book and you’re a woman, the critics think you’re wrong Jennifer Weiner never passes up an opportunity to lament how the world of literary criticism mistreats authors (like her) and readers of popular literature. “Every once in a while,” she explains, “a literary novel becomes tremendously popular, transcending the typical
Vanishing Point This piece is a translation of a speech given by Swedish novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard on receiving a German literary award. Here the writer explains how reading fiction helps us to understand humanity in general by focusing our awareness on individual people. What characterizes our age is “the sheer volume of images of
The universe within. This is not an example of outstanding writing. But I can’t help but warm to someone who can write this: While reading you create a universe within you where your characters talk and move through breathtaking landscapes and everything is as unique as you and your imagination are. You become the container
Is Google Books Leading Researchers Astray? Google Books, “a searchable digital archive of millions of texts spanning the history of the printed word,” can allow scholars to analyze the history of language and culture. But a recent published paper by three data scientists from the University of Vermont claims that the basic design of Google
She swoons to conquer Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has a Ph.D. in the eighteenth century novel, asks, “Readers of romance fiction enjoy tales of alpha males and forced seduction. Could they still be considered feminists?” In 2013, Americans spent $1.08 billion dollars on romance novels, which represented a whopping 13 per cent of the adult-fiction revenue
One of the activities that my daily blogging challenge is cutting heavily into is reading. Since I’m not currently adding many new titles to my lifetime reading list, I’m turning to some other lists for a bit of consolation. I think that for next year I’ll have to define for myself a serious reading challenge.
4 More Literary Lists, and Where I Stand on Each Read More »
10 Best Novels by Poets Novelist and poet Naja Marie Aidt offers a list of novels “that bring a poetic sensitivity to language into the history of the novel.” She especially asks us to take a look at the work of the Danish poets included (the first two entries on her list), whom we Americans
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Everything Science Knows About Reading On Screens This article summarizes research into how we read differently on screens than in books. Of course not all screens are the same: A smartphone screen is much smaller than a laptop or desktop computer screen, a Kindle is different from an iPad. “But many researchers say that reading
Related Posts: Review: “Go Set a Watchman” Compendium on “Go Set a Watchman” More on Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” Lee, Harper. Go Set a Watchman New York: HarperCollins, 2015 ISBN 978–0–06–240985–0 Consensus is that Go Set a Watchman is the manuscript that Harper Lee originally submitted to publisher J. B. Lippincott Company in
“Go Set a Watchman”: A Lesson in Writing & Reading Fiction Read More »
