This is Banned Book Week. Should books be banned? With no small amount of curiosity, I set out to discover what qualifies as a banned book. I was curious to see what books end up getting banned and somewhat surprised to find that books of a quality both high and low end up on that […]
Have you read 1984 lately? [Poll]
June 12, 2013 by
[Don’t forget to take the poll at the bottom and leave your comments if you’ve read the book] If they haven’t already, apparently, a lot of people will be reading George Orwell’s classic predictions about big government soon. In the wake of the NSA snooping–allegations of listening in on Verizon customers and the PRISM program […]
Fear on the rise in our literature
April 6, 2013 by
Could we be using fewer words associated with happiness and joy and more associated with fear in recent decades? With Google digitization of hundreds of years of literature, British anthropologists are mapping the rise and fall of “emotion” words through history, says an NPR story. This effort began simply with lists of “emotion” words: 146 […]
5 Minute Book Review | Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
October 21, 2012 by
Every once and a while I read a book because I’m supposed to, whether because it won the Pulitzer or Nobel or Booker, or some other prestigious prize, or it’s just old enough to have been granted “classic” status.
Usually, the book turns out to be just as good, or at least just as notable, as it is supposed to be.
Contributor post on KSL.com: “Fiction is good for you…”
May 15, 2012 by
In case you missed it, my post on the benefits of reading fiction, and why you should read it, was posted by KSL.com this morning. Click on over to KSL and take a look and, if you like it, please share it. Thanks!
Book Review: “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” by Charles Hill
March 20, 2012 by
IIn Hill’s eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The “international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm,” he argues. “[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. [cont…]
Book Review: “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster
January 26, 2012 by
It’s a rare day that I’m willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It’s rarer still that I’ll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.
It’s just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it. [cont…]
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