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Below are the three most popular book trailers from last week over at BookRiot.tv. Click the cover to watch the trailer.
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Our most popular posts from the week that was… I’d always expected that when I learned of my dad’s death, I’d cry, rage, and scream. I thought I’d have this amazing emotive experience, expelling all my pain in one great explosion, like an erupting volcano. Instead, when Ray died, my anguish found no voice. I [...]
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge. Reading the last sentences of books you will probably never read is oddly compelling. ____________________________ Where Wallace probably went wrong was in confusing the Greek nomos, meaning “law,” with onoma, meaning “name.” Consider that a variation of onoma was onuma; the switch from omicron to upsilon [...]
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I read thematically. Sometimes for months I am interested in Victorian scientific instruments, other times books about how to write a poem. Recently, I have been reading exclusively about the plague. That’s right, the bubonic plague, so named for the buboes, or pustules that emerged on a victim’s neck and groin, grew to grotesque sizes, [...]
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My adventure back through Toni Morrison’s backlist in preparation for our Riot Reading Day on May 8 rolls on. See previous installments here. ____________________ I had grand plans to try Jeff’s close-reading technique with this opening, but the foreword contains Morrison’s own close-reading of the first sentence.* And it’s not like I want to compete [...]
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Boy does the internet like a list. And boy, does the bookish internet love a book list. Here’s a round-up of recent books lists that caught our attention. At Elle, 10 Books Taboo for Their Time At Cracked, 6 Popular Children’s Books That Teach Kids Horrible Lessons At The Guardian, Top Ten Literary Feuds At Entrepreneur, 10 [...]
Read the full postFriday at last! What do you want to talk about so you can head into the weekend happy?
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The other night I slammed the brakes on a film—something I rarely do, but this one managed to be both florid and boring, like a PT Cruiser. It was Nora, a biopic of James Joyce. Even Ewan McGregor couldn’t save it, and he’s got plenty of lit-flicks to his name, from Pillow Book to Miss [...]
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Stop!…Grammar Time is an occasional feature about grammar, style, and writing. Sometimes with 90s Top-40 references. Sometimes not. ____________________________ Ok, great. You know how to use a semi-colon. You know to prefer the active voice, and you know about split infinitives and omitting needless words. Congratulations. But, style-god, how is your logic? It’s unfortunate that most writing courses, [...]
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(Yeah, I spell judgement like a Canadian. Deal with it.) You know how sometimes you see someone reading a book, and you want to judge them — you want to judge them so hard – but you can’t think of what to say? There’s a flowchart for that! This flowchart teaches you how to make snap [...]
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Posted byIn the March 18th edition of the NY Times, there’s a piece by Jhumpa Lahiri called “My Life’s Sentences.” It’s the first in a new series - Draft, “on the art of craft of writing” – and I was happy to see this idea kicked off by a consideration of sentences, those magical, mysterious guts that make up [...]
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To explore this phenomenon, we asked an assortment of literary-inclined people to revisit the books they loved back in the day, the ones that make them absolutely cringe today. So much hate for On the Road. It’s gone from overrated to underrated now methinks. ____________________________ “The story will be called The End of All [...]
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This installment of Riot Recommendation is sponsored by After the Snow by S.D. Crockett. The oceans stopped working before Willo was born, so the world of ice and snow is all he’s ever known. He lives with his family deep in the wilderness, far from the government’s controlling grasp. Willo’s survival skills are put to the test [...]
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I didn’t go to any schools that really required memorization. I have a vague memory of needing to memorize the Gettysburg Address in fifth grade, and there may have been extra credit for the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen speech” in 10th grade English. But in general, my memorization skills have mostly been used for song lyrics [...]
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Welcome to Name That Author!, a Name That Tune-style author-guessing game. We start by giving you one clue, then one additional clue per hour through the afternoon. The first person to guess the author correctly wins a book of our choosing, and all other correct guessers will be entered into a drawing at the end [...]
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On the surface, The Odds and Delirium don’t have much in common. Delirium is a popular YA dystopian novel. The Odds is a new novella from Stewart O’Nan, one of contemporary adult fiction’s most prolific writers. Delirium is about the power of love in a world where love is considered a disease. The Odds is about the end of a marriage [...]
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Interesting discussion about teaching the Bible as literature in yesterday’s thread. Today, I’m fully in the throes of spring fever and feeling overwhelmed by my reading goals. What’s on your mind?
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Few genres are more fabulously dorky, and in my opinion, therefore more fabulously escapist, than science fiction about communicating telepathically with dragons. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, which includes the breathless, bodice-ripping titles Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon, are all about communicating telepathically with dragons, on a planet called Pern. Deadly silver Threads [...]
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Hope springs eternal! Happy Opening Day! Baseball’s summer-long march to the Fall Classic begins today, and to celebrate and get you in the spirit, here’s a list of six great baseball novels. 6. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud — You’re probably more familiar with the 1984 Robert Redford vehicle than the 1952 novel, which have [...]
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Last week, the MLA* ranked the top 25 American writers according to the amount of scholarship that has been devoted to those writers and their works in the past 25 years. I looked over the list, and, for the most part I was not all that surprised by the names that I found there. I [...]
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