Tag Archives: literature

Women’s Groups and the Rise of the #BookClub | JSTOR #books #reading #women

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Since 1989, leisure reading groups have become a full-fledged phenomenon and are now found everywhere from offices to religious communities to, increasingly, virtual platforms. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, the New York Times reports an estimated 5 million Americans belong to a book club. Even more belong to online reading groups like those housed on the popular site goodreads.com, which has 40 million members. Large-scale book clubs even have the power to influence the publishing market. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in January he was starting an online reading group humbly titled A Year of Books, his first pick shot up amazon.com’s sales list, surging overnight from 45,140 to the top 10. The public, it seems, has fully embraced book club culture.

Or, at least, a certain demographic has. The population of in-person book clubs skews heavily toward college-educated women, and a large proportion of these groups are single-sex, either by default or design. READ MORE: Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club | JSTOR Daily.

#Sex Talk in #Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire #books #research

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Sex Talk in Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire

A British health website, DrEd.com, delved into the entire corpus of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, to explore the way certain words having to do with “venereal” matters have appeared, faded, or been associated with new companion words over the last two centuries. READ MORE: Sex Talk in Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire.

How to Spot Whodunnit: Academics Crack Agatha Christie’s Code | The Guardian #AgathaChristie #books

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Rather than watching brain-numbing reality television this summer, I am determined to watch all 13 series of Agatha Christie’s Poroit TV series starring David Suchet. Just finished Series 6 and will be picking up Series 7 & 8 from my local library today. I correctly guess the culprit only half the time. It’s been awesome. Yes, I am a bit of a mystery genre geek.   

For almost 100 years, Agatha Christie has beguiled readers with her much-loved mysteries. But now a panel of experts claims to have worked out how to answer the perennial question: whodunnit?

To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of the world’s best-selling novelist, academics have created a formula that they claim will enable the reader to identify the killer before the likes of Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple have managed the feat.

The research, commissioned by the TV channel Drama, analysed 27 of the prolific writer’s books – 83 were published during her lifetime – including classics such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. The experts concluded that where the novel was set, the main mode of transport used and how the victim dies were among the key clues. READ MORE: How to spot whodunnit: academics crack Agatha Christie’s code | Books | The Guardian.

[Interactive] Map of American Literature’s Most Epic #RoadTrips | Atlas Obscura #literature #maps #books

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The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips | Atlas Obscura

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times. READ MORE: The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips | Atlas Obscura.

This is Your Brain on #JaneAusten, and Researchers at Stanford are Taking Notes | Stanford News #books #reading #neuroscience #cognition

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Researchers observe the brain patterns of literary PhD candidates while they’re reading a Jane Austen novel. The fMRI images suggest that literary reading provides “a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.” READ MORE: This is your brain on Jane Austen, and researchers at Stanford are taking notes | Stanford News

I Never Noticed How Racist So Many Children’s #Books Are Until I Started #Reading to My #Kids [Opinion] | Vox #diversity #racism #culture

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What happened to Little Black Sambo? As a white girl growing up in West Virginia in the 1970s, I remember it on my childhood bookshelf. It was on my friends’ shelves too. It may also have been in the dentist’s office, along with Highlights for Children and Joseph and His Coat of Many Colors.

It was not on the shelves of the local day care, a center run by an entrepreneurial black woman who saw a business opportunity in the droves of young white mothers who were socialized in the 1950s and ’60s to be housewives and then dumped into the workforce by the 1970s economy.

I remember the story primarily for its description of the tigers chasing one another round and round a tree until they melt into butter, butter that Sambo’s mother uses for a stack of crispy pancakes. In the 35 intervening years, I knew the book had been relegated to the dustbin of racist cultural artifacts, but I didn’t remember it well enough to know why. READ MORE: I never noticed how racist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids | Vox.

Dune, 50 Years On: How a Science Fiction Novel Changed the World | The Guardian #books #SciFi #ScienceFiction #Dune

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It has sold millions of copies, is perhaps the greatest novel in the science-fiction canon and Star Wars wouldn’t have existed without it. Frank Herbert’s Dune should endure as a politically relevant fantasy from the Age of Aquarius. READ MORE: Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world | Books | The Guardian.

53 #Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down | @BuzzFeed #reading

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Diverse list of mostly fiction titles spanning all genres and recommended by BuzzFeed readers.

We recently asked subscribers of the BuzzFeed Books newsletter to tell us about a book we wouldn’t be able to put down. They gave us a lot to choose from, so take your pick — and get hooked. READ: 53 Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down | BuzzFeed.

For One Year, This Publisher Will Only Release #Books By #Women | HuffPost #publishing #genderequality

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In 2014, only 27 percent of authors represented in The Times Literary Supplement were women, only 40 percent from The Paris Review, only 29 percent from The Nation. These numbers are courtesy of the annual VIDA count, an effort to shed light on gender inequity in the Western literary world.

Although the count, in its fifth year, has promoted positive change — The New York Times has steadily upped its coverage of women, and writer Joanna Walsh declared 2014 the Year of Reading Women as a result — there is still much ground to cover, as the above statistics only begin to indicate. Books about women still don’t win major prizes; books by women are still likely to be packaged as unserious.

To begin to address these discrepancies, author Kamila Shamsie published “a provocation” in the Guardian this month: Let 2018, the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.K., be a Year of Publishing Women.

READ MORE: For One Year, This Publisher Will Only Release Books By Women | HuffPost

25 Great Literary Series to Replace Your TV Habit This Summer | Flavorwire #books #summerreading #summerreads

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Summertime is upon us: sticky subway rides, backyard barbecues, and a general lack of solid television. You should be outside anyway! I know, hilarious. But instead of binge-watching something old on Netflix, why not binge-read a great book series? You’ll get all the enjoyment of sticking with characters for hours and hours, through complicated, folding plots, and you can make it so Hugh Dancy plays every role (what do books look like in your mind?). Plus, you know, you can totally read these outside. After the jump, check out 25 awesome literary series to read this summer. And, of course, there are lots more out there, so add your favorite to the list. READ MORE: 25 Great Literary Series to Replace Your TV Habit This Summer | Flavorwire.

You May Also Like: Massive List of Summer Reading Lists [2015] #books #summerreading #summer2015 | Infophile