Chief among your more anxiety-producing kinds of literature is the genre of books geared towards expectant mothers. Examples of the genre offer every bit of advice imaginable — much of it contradictory — and condemn a laundry list of relatively common behaviors. At Salon, our own Lydia Kiesling recounts her own dive into the pregnancy-lit waters. This might also be a good time to read fellow staff writer Edan Lepucki on the perils of reading while expecting.
What to Expect
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The word “whom” appears “just 53 times out of every million [spoken] words,” according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This does not bode well for members of future generations – some of whom may be fond of formality.
CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda's remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn't die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate's official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers' houses.
“Speaking of Memory”
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Birkenhead goes back to Nabokov's Speak, Memory and considers "the way our memories tell themselves to us: in hints, collisions, and rushes, overlapping, upside down, out of order." Pair with our own Garth Risk Hallberg's piece on reading Ada, or Ardor.
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Boys
Rest assured, fellow Millennials: even Balzac had to intern.