“Riordan’s books prompt an uneasy interrogation of the premise underlying the ‘so long as they’re reading’ side of the debate—at least among those of us who want to share Neil Gaiman’s optimistic view that all reading is good reading, and yet find ourselves by disposition closer to the Tim Parks end of the spectrum, worried that those books on our children’s shelves that offer easy gratification are crowding out the different pleasures that may be offered by less grabby volumes.” In an essay for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead considers questions about what children should be reading through the lens of the Percy Jackson series.
“The Percy Jackson Problem”
“Hana caraka / data sawala”
Fun Fact: the Javanese alphabet, read sequentially, comprises a pretty beautiful poem. What's your language's alphabet done lately?
Dzanc Sessions
With sessions beginning this month, "The Dzanc Sessions are designed for writers who are ready to amplify, polish, and advance their writing. An eclectic platform of craft-based workshops are offered in a series of online sessions throughout the year, with specializations in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting." Signing up earns you a free print book or access to their eBook club.
More on the Ailing Humanities
Adding to the general hand-wringing over the state of the humanities, Lee Siegel contradicts Leon Wieseltier’s lament that fewer college students are majoring in literature by contending that modern literature courses ruin the joy of reading. “For every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few,” he writes, “there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair.” (You can also read a similar argument from a humanities professor in The New Republic.)
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Social Media Existence Precedes Essence
Over at McSweeney’s, Sarah Solomon has undertaken the Sisyphean task of bringing existentialism into the twenty-first century. In a series of brief vignettes, Solomon gives the oft-maligned Millennial generation the existentialist makeover they never asked for. Continue your study of the absolute indifference of the universe with this essay by Zach Pontz on The Meursault Investigation, a new novel by Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud that imagines Albert Camus’s famous The Stranger from the perspective of the unnamed Arab antagonists.
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Tales from Swankville
When Pleasanton mom Siah Fried and her co-author wrote Tales from Swankville, a book about hyper-competitive parenting in suburbia, they didn't expect their neighbors to take it so personally.
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The Women Who Reclaimed the Streets
“For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she’s got to be a walker – someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind façades, penetrating into secret courtyards. Virginia Woolf called it ‘street haunting’ in an essay by that name: sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the ‘champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets,’ we leave the things that define us at home, and become ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.’” On the female flâneur. Also check out this Millions essay about the flâneur in modern fiction.
The Secret Space of Diaries
For the New Yorker, Morgan Jerkins reviews Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and considers what keeping a diary means for “a black woman in a white world.”
This is from a few months ago, and it was just a snobbish now as it was then.
I so agree with Matt and Neil Gaiman, having misspent my youth reading tons and tons of comic books (not graphic novels, but Caspar and Richie Rich and Fantastic 4, in all their flat, cheerful glory) and “abridged classics”, and just generally cheesy mid-century kid’s books now long out of print (much of it woefully un-P,C: “Pale-Face Redskins” was a particular favorite. I blush.) Not to mention “de-classified” textbooks from the 30’s and 40’s that my teacher dad brought home whenever the school board ordered newer ones, also pretty cretinous. And leave us not forget TV and movie novelizations — every single Star Trek and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and Girl From U.N.C.L.E. we could find. The pleasures of cheap mass-market paperbacks — none of that Caldecott stuff for us!
I could go on and on with our many down-market enthusiasms — how we graduated to gothic novels and regency romances with heaving bodice covers .Even (gasp!) Emily Loring and Harlequin Romances — we were very young — don’t hate me) How I spent every study period of 9th grade in the school library finishing Marjorie Morningstar and Gone with the Wind and some other saggy, baggy stuff of which I loved every silly, melodramatic word.
I thank my folks for sending me to the library unchaperoned and for giving me a quarter for the church white sale where I found “Star Girl” for a nickel and an old Whitman edition of “Eight Cousins” with the lurid technicolor cover for a dime. I thank them for having busy enough lives that obsessing over my reading was not an option for them. I especially thank them for not censoring the first and best years of this readers life, when, as Gaiman points out, everything is new and nothing is hackneyed. Here’s to freedom and reading at will and trusting kids to know their own tastes.