We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
Musical Theories
Breaking the Binary
Rachel Klein writes on raising a genderqueer, non-binary child. “Being a parent means, at some point, being able to look on as your child writes their own story, a story in which you play a role but which is ultimately not about you.”
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Death and Taxes
Souvankham Thammavongsa's new fiction is required reading for anyone who's ever had a meltdown in an accountant's office.
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The YA Diet
From Hunger Games‘s Katniss to Divergent‘s Tris, today’s YA heroines are confident, intelligent, powerful, and always skinny. At The Atlantic, Julianne Ross argues that this scrawny stereotype ends up belittling the heroines’ independence and strength. “Just as women are expected to be sexual but not slutty, pure but not prudish, heroines should be strong but not buff.”
Rising to the Surface
“In real life, we are often so bound by social convention, but at the same time we all have secret, inexplicable aspects of ourselves. The parts that nobody else sees. In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.” Salon interviews Laura van den Berg about her new novel, Find Me, which we covered in our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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