Reading

Monday Miscellany

Because I was sick for much of last week, this week’s entry is short. Stories don’t need morals or messages Salon’s Laura Miller caused a flurry of comments recently with this article about a post on the New York Times education blog. In that post the parents of twins talked about taking their kids’ third-grade […]

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Monday Miscellany

America’s Most Literate Cities, 2011 Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

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Monday Miscellany

Finally, Out with the Old Year. . . In what I promise will be the last list of “best books of 2011” reported here, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles summarizes his favorite novels of 2011 in the following categories: most devastating best Western weirdest sex best seafaring tale most metaphysical best novel about novels

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Monday Miscellany

Happy New Year! Novels and Television Recent news that HBO plans to adapt the works of William Faulkner for television has prompted critical discussion of the suitability of novels for this kind of medium translation. “The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time,” declares Laura Miller in TV and the novel:

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Monday Miscellany

If your life is anything like mine, you’re swamped right about now with holiday preparations and festivities. This week’s installment of Monday Miscellany, therefore, will be mercifully short. An Introduction to Psych You Up. Literally. Maria Konnikova is a woman after my own heart. At Scientific American she has just introduced her new column, Literally

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Monday Miscellany

Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early

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Monday Miscellany

Why is dystopia so appealing to young adults? A dystopia is an imaginary world in which people live dehumanized lives of fear and subjugation; it’s the opposite of utopia. In this piece YA writer Moira Young examines why distopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’s recent Hunger Games trilogy are so popular with young people: Books

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Monday Miscellany

Vashon Great Books club one of oldest in U.S. The Seattle Times spotlights 92-year-old Grace Crecelius: For 61 years, Grace Crecelius has cracked the books. Not just any books, mind you, but the works of Plato, Descartes and Kant, Shakespeare, Marx and Freud. At 92, Crecelius is the oldest member of what may be one

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Monday Miscellany

The greatest death scenes in literature Five judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature ponder the question “What makes for a great literary death scene?” Tim Lott calls their choices “eclectic.” Take a look, and see if you have other favorite death scenes to add to the list. The 10

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