Recommended Reading: Clare Beams writes for Ploughshares about the effect of reading a story in which someone reads a story.
Reading about Reading
A Bookstore of Common Prayer
Common dreams, common bookstores: "I went home with...the BookWoman bumper sticker, which reads: 'Support Your Feminist Bookstore — She Supports You.'"
But I wanna have it both ways.
Alexander Nazaryan joins legions of hand wringers in this short rumination on children's reading and e-reading. Me, I just want it both ways.
●
●
The 2013 Bad Sex Awards
It’s not Christmas, but it’s close. It’s time for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award Shortlist to be released. This year’s finalists include My Education author Susan Choi and famous folk singer Woody Guthrie among others, and the winner(?) will be announced on December 3rd. (Bonus: Their Twitter account is sharing particularly awful excerpts as well.)
●
●
“Adams”
From The Rumpus, a new short (short) story by George Saunders, excerpted from Life is Short - Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, with an introduction by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman.
●
●
The Truth Hurts
Good news! According to Vinson Cunningham’s new essay in The New Yorker, beauty merely “masks and perfumes ... it freezes moral categories in place,” whereas ugliness, on the other hand, “is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” Wait, is that good news? Bonus: Vinson wrote a Year in Reading piece for us.
●
●
The Good Kind of Bad
In a Simpsons episode from the late nineties, Lisa Simpson, concerned that her mental skills may be deteriorating, manages to finagle her way onto a local TV news broadcast, where she urges the residents of Springfield to read two books: To Kill a Mockingbird and Harriet the Spy. At first glance, the two novels might not seem to have that much in common, but as Anna Holmes argues in a blog post for The New Yorker, the books share “ideas about the complexity, sophistication, and occasional wickedness of young girls’ imaginations.” (You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Malcolm Gladwell and To Kill a Mockingbird.)
●
●