First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
Reading As Punishment
From the Dept. of Whaaa?
Mystery author James Patterson has written a novel called The Murder of Steven King that apparently describes the eponymous author’s death at the hands of a deranged fan. While King declined to comment on the book, he has in the past said of Patterson that the latter is “a terrible writer but he’s very successful.” And now you must read our editor-in-chief Lydia Kiesling’s essay, “Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King.”
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A Wasted Life
“I have wasted my life.” Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring takes a look at James Wright‘s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and the many interpretations readers have brought to its famous last line. Among those readers is David Mitchell, who wrote about the same poem in an essay for The Atlantic‘s By Heart series earlier this year.
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Did You Say Sudoku
“Tsundoku: the acquiring of reading materials followed by letting them pile up and subsequently never reading them.” Do you buy books and let them languish? According to Ozy, there’s a Japanese word for that. Might we encourage your tsundoku habit by encouraging you to look at this list of our favorite October releases?
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Book Signings in the Digital Age
The New York Times looks at new technological efforts to make book signings work in the age of the ebook. One idea is an e-reader add-on that lets the reader snap a photo with the author, which the author can then sign with a “digital stylus.” The photo is meant to make its way to Twitter and Facebook, of course. “Bragging potential? Endless,” says the Times. Authors: get ready to say “cheese”?
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Famous in France
France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, has been awarded to the French-Moroccan journalist and novelist Leïla Slimani, The New York Times reports. Slimani’s book, Chanson Douce, is loosely based on a tragic case in New York City in which two children were murdered by their caretaker. Earlier this year we reviewed another book that was a finalist for the prize, The Heart.
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Songs of Experience
More on Maurice Sendak’s last book, My Brother’s Book, and the influence of William Blake.
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Wow – not punishment but rehabilitation of the highest order!
I have to agree with Meredith. Being rewarded for doing something doesn’t really sound like punishment. Rather it sounds more like a reward for putting real effort into their own rehabilitation.
Sounds like a fabulous idea to me. Wouldn’t reading & writing book reports be a great alternative to solitary confinement?
I don’t see the sentence reduction as a punishment, but as an inducement to better themselves.