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Dude, Where’s my ‘Walden’?
A recently announced project on Kickstarter aims to fund the publication of a revised edition of Walden with “modernized vocabulary” and the aim of allowing “modern readers” to be enriched by the...
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Could Their Families Have Stopped the Columbine Killers and the Unabomber?
What is it like to live with—and even love—someone who, it turns out, is a monster? Two new memoirs describe such a reality and they make for upsetting reading. “I’ve done a good job with this kid,”...
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Is ‘Sense and Sensibility’ Feminist?
Jane Austen didn’t need Hollywood to make her male characters “feminists.” That’s the insulting premise of a recent Atlantic essay by Devoney Looser, who writes that the Emma Thompson-Hugh Grant-helmed...
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Make Captain Ahab American Again
If Moby-Dick has been on your reading bucket list for years, the time has come to cross it off. Plymouth University in England has just completed its three-year project to convert Moby-Dick into an...
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The Virtues of Book Ownership
“Can you spare a dollar so I can buy this book?” I heard a man’s deep voice ask this question as I raced up a flight of stairs, speeding my way to the second floor of the local public library to drop...
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Why Ramona Quimby Still Matters
Even though she’s turning 100 years old today, Beverly Cleary still has the same fiery spirit as when she wrote her famous Ramona books, starting back in 1955. Although she’s sold over 91 million...
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Finally! A ‘Hunger Games’ for Grownups
If you are anything like me—and let us pray that you are not—you’ve likely had more than your fill of the pre-teen dystopian sci-fi/fantasy genre that Hollywood has been determined to cram down our...
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Why Are Schools Abandoning Literature?
I recently spent time with a class of fourteen-year-olds, talking about words, specifically words strung together to form speech. I started out by asking them whether they thought words could make...
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What a Reimagined ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Says About our Reality TV Addiction
Does a novel retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have anything to teach us about our reality-TV-obsessed culture? Surprisingly, it does. (Please note: in case you haven’t found time to read...
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What Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’ Gets Right About Rules
The latest issue of National Geographic arrived at our house with a dazzling cover story on Yellowstone National Park, full of images of grizzly bears, wolves, elk, and bison. Yellowstone is a wild...
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In Defense of the All-Male Book Club
Last week the Men’s Style section of The New York Times featured a piece, “Men Have Book Clubs, Too,” about the apparently growing phenomenon of men getting together to share literary interests and...
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Stop Dumbing Down Books for Teens
During my senior year AP English class in high school, we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was brutal. I thought I was a pretty good reader because I had worked my way through most of Jane...
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Does a New Novel Glorify the Manson Murders?
Has there ever been a generation in human history more devoted to self-mythology than the Baby Boomers? Casting themselves as idealistic revolutionaries, the privileged, largely white, college-educated...
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A Brief History of Summer Reading—It Wasn’t Always Beach Reads and Chick Lit
There was a time in America when summer reading was only for the “leisure class,” those who had the financial means to skip work, travel, and relax at a summer resort. Before the turn of the 20th...
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Why Character No Longer Counts in Presidential Biographies for Children
American documentarian Ken Burns has written a new book for children called Grover Cleveland, Again! The book is colorful and fun, and the title is taken from his own children’s lyrical recitation of...
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Turn Off Your TV, Read A Book, Live Longer?
We live in a golden age of video content, whether it’s TV series funded by streaming networks like Amazon Prime and Netflix or indie Kickstarter-funded movies, of which there are more and more every...
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Will Diversity Crusades Lead to More Banned Books?
The last week of September was National Banned Book Week in America, a celebratory campaign the American Library Association sponsors every year to highlight the freedom we have to read. The event also...
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The Everlasting Appeal of Natalie Babbitt
Whether they recognize her name or not, most elementary school students know Natalie Babbitt very well. They know her through the pages of her book, Tuck Everlasting, which seems like a typical...
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When Bad Words Are Said to Good Children
Should bad words be read to children? This question surfaced last week when children’s author Dan Gutman posted his response to a parent letter on Facebook asking whether it was appropriate to use the...
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A Really Tedious Book about “A Really Good Day”
It’s been more than a decade since lawyer and author Ayelet Waldman confessed, in an essay in the New York Times, that she loved her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than her kids, and enjoyed a...
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