It’s the time of year for academic send-offs, graduation gifts, and general future-gazing. Understandably, college and universities like to send their graduates out on a high note, so the tenor of commencement speeches is hopeful and inspiring. Thing is, post-graduation life is considerably more complicated than “be the change you want to see in the [...]
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This round of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller. Storied, fiercely competitive Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code; its reputation has been unsullied for decades. Now a long-dormant secret society, Prisom’s Party, threatens its placid halls with vigilante justice, exposing students and teachers alike for [...]
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The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, on sale date June 11, 2013) This book is an iteration of the technique where a book follows a number of different stories that turn out to be linked. In this novel, the common thread is a particular antique diamond ring. The stories connected by the ring are [...]
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Earlier this month, Derek wrote about The Smallest Book in the World (and Other Really Little Books). Everyone loves the charm of miniature books, but a few collectors have taken this love above and beyond to create some of the most unique and valuable libraries in the world. That’s right, I’m talking about doll house [...]
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Reinterpreting myths, fairy tales, and folk tales is way more than a cottage industry—a castle industry?—in publishing these days. From literary fiction (The Tiger’s Wife) to YA (Robin McKinley’s books, Runemarks) to graphic novels (the Fable series, The Sigh) to humor (Gods Behaving Badly), authors are picking up and reimagining bits and pieces from millennia [...]
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Handsome Symbologist Robert Langdon is at it again! He wakes up with retrograde amnesia in a hospital in Florence, barely escapes an attempt on his life, acquires a plucky female sidekick, and gets down to the important business of being handsome and symbology-solving. And that’s all within, like, the first twenty pages of Dan [...]
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Our full-text RSS feed this week is sponsored by Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller. Click here to subscribe to Book Riot via RSS and to be notified of new posts to stay up-to-date on all the latest.* Storied, fiercely competitive Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code; its reputation has been [...]
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A couple of weeks ago, I challenged you to guess some famous characters by their physical descriptions. Well, we’re back with a similar challenge. This time, though, it’s guess the setting. I’ll give you a description of a place from a novel, and you try to guess it. Ready? (Link to answers at the end….) Here [...]
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Blume has “zero -interest” in penning more YA—a genre that didn’t exist when she was writing it. “I don’t consider myself a young-adult writer,” she says firmly. Is it just me or is that sort of a sick burn by Judy Blume? ____________________________ And I have a real problem with this idea that only [...]
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Rosenblum: “My niece, upon seeing the first Harry Potter movie asked why Harry and Hermione and Ron always went to the ‘library’ at Hogwarts to look stuff up. ‘Why don’t they just google it?’ A reasonable question.” Besides the ridiculousness of this statement (I mean, why would secret material about the Dark Arts even BE on [...]
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___________________________ Sign up for our newsletter to have the best of Book Riot delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks. No spam. We promise. To keep up with Book Riot on a daily basis, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, , and subscribe to the Book Riot podcast in iTunes or [...]
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I thought I’d take a look at the SAT Subject Test in literature as a mini case study. I chose the Literature test because it’s a subject I’m supposed to know something about. After all, I have a B.A. and a PhD in English. I have spent the last 25 years thinking about, writing about, [...]
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The Book Riot Podcast, Episode #2: Pillow Talk with Robert Langdon Jeff and Rebecca talk about The Great Gatsby movie reactions and box office, along with discussions on the new Dan Brown novel, ebook market share, a tool to randomly browse the Amazon bookstore, the trailer for James Franco’s As I Lay Dying, and Judy Blume’s disavowal [...]
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After my post Genre Kryptonite: African Literature, I was floored with feedback and wanted to follow up with a few authors based on suggestions from our rockin’ readers. Two new African literature books appeared on my doorstep (magic, I tell you!) and I wasted no time getting to them. Both books had a profound effect [...]
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Look, I know it’s the cool thing to scoff at Dan Brown and lament the fact that the “good” books and the popular books don’t overlap more. But that conversation is a snoozefest, and any author who can sell millions of books and help keep a publishing house in business is good news for readers. So I think it’s [...]
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People think I’m ridiculous when I tell them I have certain relationships with books, and that those relationships dictate how I read those books. Why don’t you just finish one book before you pick up another? That book was terrible, how could you finish that one and not this one? And how could you LIKE [...]
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It’s been my mission these last few years to expand my readerly horizons and try out genres I’ve never read before, usually because I had silly notions of what they were about and the kinds of people who read them. Admitting to myself that I was holding untested theories (okay, they were stereotypes) about what kinds [...]
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Our START HERE book project grew out of the recognition that every reader has one author–and in some cases, many authors–they haven’t read because they don’t know where to start. Some writers are so prolific, and the choices so overwhelming, that it can seem easier to not read them than to try to find a good [...]
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This week’s List List is sponsored by Biographile. Love true stories about fascinating people? So do the folks at Biographile, a website dedicated to helping readers discover a rich mix of real lives through author interviews, news updates, reviews, essays, contests, and more. One of their latest Q&As is an exclusive interview with the hilarious comedian and actor Jim [...]
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