Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, is controversial. Although shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, the quality of the book has been relentlessly questioned since its release. There are several criticisms that often come up when the book is challenged, but the two most prominent complaints are as follows: The book is melodramatic. The characters are underdeveloped. As someone who cannot make up their mind about the novel, I’d like to get into exactly why these criticisms are being made, and see what these issues mean for the quality of the book. …
John Green, our beloved patron saint of stirring young adult fiction, is a voracious reader. I don’t understand how the man has time for anything, let alone the thousands of books that occupy his home library. I remember being a Vlogbrothers viewer back in the late 2000s and watching the many bookshelf tour videos he would make and marveling at how any one person could be so well and widely read.
Today, September 25th, is Shel Silverstein’s birthday! You have almost certainly heard of Shel Silverstein from his books of poetry, his cartoons, and his children’s books, including The Giving Tree. Silverstein had a remarkable life, both before and after his career took off. His early life was full of several events that shaped the writer he would eventually become. Image via the Poetry Foundation In honor of Shel Silverstein’s life and work, here are a few stories from his life before fame. He was drawn to comics by growing up during the Great Depression. Silverstein was born in …
Banned Books Week is coming! That means that the period between September 23d and September 29th is a time to recognize and celebrate works suppressed by censorship for dubious reasons. This years theme is “Banning Books Silences Stories.” Not everyone is jazzed for Banned Books week. Specifically, a group of pastors in Maine are distinctly not jazzed. In fact, they are so devoid of jazz that they recently sought to have a local library in Maine ban books from the banned book table they’ve set up for Banned Book Week. And the repetition in that sentence makes me think of that one …
Many among us are obsessed with the state of our bookshelves. We meticulously organize, arrange, and decorate our personal libraries according to varying criteria: author, title, color, height, etc. But how often have you paused to consider how those books made it to your bookshelf? Have you ever read between the lines of one of your favorite works and found something troubling? And how often have you stopped to wonder about the classic works accepted into the Western literary canon and why they’re there? Those of us who have ever studied postcolonial theory have, at the very least, a cursory …
