Recommended Reading: “Ode to Country Music” by Sandra Simonds.
“If I wasn’t such a deadbeat, I’d learn Greek.”
“Everything goes and nothing matters.”
Recommended Reading: “When Literature Was Dangerous,” a history of censorship and the development of a culture “in which literature lacks urgency” and, perhaps, significance.
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Weekend Prizewinners
Next by James Hynes has been named the winner of The Believer Book Award, and it was announced Friday that Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver took home the Best Translated Book Award. The book was competing with a shortlist of ten novels in translation.
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Time and Relationships
“When we think of novels, we often think of chunks of time and the action during those periods. But when I think of time, my teenage years particularly, I think of relationships.” Recent Year in Reading alum Darcey Steinke talks with The Rumpus about being a teenage girl, motherlessness, “quiet” books and her new novel, Sister Golden Hair.
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Digital Nation
Point: “Repeated surveys show that children spend less time reading than did previous generations. They instead devote many hours of their waking lives to electronic screens of one kind or another.” Counterpoint: “Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1989, spent the most money on books in 2011, taking over long-held book-buying leadership from baby boomers…with 43 percent of GenY’s purchases going to online channels, they are adding momentum to the industry shift to digital.” Conclusion?
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Recovering Iris Murdoch
With many of her books no longer in print, Iris Murdoch's posthumous reputation leaves much to be desired, and her ardent fans seek to rectify this.
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Caution: Little Fires May Grow
“But the truth is that even very small actions can ripple outwards and have huge and far-reaching effects. In other words, the fires you start can be little, but don’t think they don’t matter, or that they won’t spread.” The Los Angeles Review of Books interviewed Celeste Ng about writing about women, transracial adoption, and her novel, Little Fires Everywhere (featured in multiple Year in Reading entries).