Odysseus Didn’t Rely on Grit; Neither Should You
Situational Agency Beats Willpower: Reviewing Angela Duckworth’s ‘Situated’
Culture
Miller's Book Review.
Celebrating All Things Literary
Recent essays
30 of 77Why Solve a Murder When Everyone’s Doomed?
A Serial Killer, a Doomed Planet, and the Stubborn Human Need for Justice: Reviewing Akane Araki’s Apocalyptic Whodunit ‘Murder at the End of the World’
Watch What You Say: Free Speech and ‘Problematic’ Lit
Bundle Review of ‘The Future of Free Speech,’ ‘Just Plain Filthy,’ and ‘That Book Is Dangerous’
G.K. Chesterton’s Nightmare: ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’
The Breakneck, Surrealist Spy Thriller That Works Like a Dream
The Daunting Art of Selling Fewer Books
How CEO James Daunt Is Turning Barnes & Noble Into a Serendipity Engine
It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It: Emily St. John Mandel’s Worlds of Trouble
Reviewing Her Latest, ‘Exit Party’—with a Little Backstory
Bookish Diversions: Books Are Alive and Well
The Man Behind B&N’s Comeback, Paperbacks, Hermit Crab Press, ‘The Last Upheaval,’ ‘Jane Eyre’ in China—but not Texas
I Bit Off More Books Than I Could Chew
Are Reading Goals Any Good? A Look at the Data and an Update on My Big-Ass Classic Novel Goal
The Way the World Could Be, or the Way the World Is?
Reviewing Peco Gaskovski’s Latest ‘The Last Upheaval’
Bookish Diversions: All the Presidents’ Books
Washington’s Radicals and Rogues, Kennedy’s Cuba Advisor, Tricky Dick, Obama’s Lists, Trump’s Favs, More
30 Years Ago, I Published Wendell Berry—by Hand
A Look Inside the Printing Process of a Small-Press Edition of the Late Poet’s Work
Books Will Never Die—if Publishers Remember What Books Do and How They Do It
Resisting AI Market Erosion by Publishing for the Encounter Economy
Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Freak-out Edition
If Someone Makes a Movie You Hate, What Do You Do?
My Books Needed a House of Their Own
Come Inside My Backyard Library—and the Process of Building It
Open Thread: Hard to Finish?
What Books Do You Find Hard to Complete?
Don Quixote’s Guide to Better Reading
Cervantes Knew the Dangers of Believing Everything You Read. His Remedy? Another Book
How Long Till Death Revokes Your Library Card?
You Can Only Read So Many Books in This Lifetime. What if You Knew How Many You Had Left? Would It Matter? (Plus: Books I Want to Read Before I Kick the Bucket)
My Sons Read ‘Middlemarch’ and Sided Against Dorothea
What Do Teenage Boys Make of the Complexities of George Eliot’s Eternal Classic?
Books: Indispensable When You’re Indisposed
The One Place You Really Need a Good Book—And Several to Try for Yourself
Bookish Diversions: Is Anyone Reading Anything?
Bogus Reading Crisis Stats, Tedious Literary Fiction, 3 Elements of the Humanities
Can We Be Honest? The Tricky Side of the Truth
A Conversation with Philosopher Christian B. Miller on Honesty, Sincerity, and BS
Arrested for a Late Manuscript: Seicho Matsumoto’s ‘Tokyo Express’
A Perfectly Plotted Mystery and an Author Who Couldn’t Deliver It
That’s the Deal: What Rankles You Most About AI Prose?
How the Gift Economy Explains Our Disgust with LLM Writing
I Quit One of Literature’s Greatest Novels
Some Questions to Ponder When a Book Just Doesn’t Work for You
Protect Good Reading from Bad Schooling
Augustine, Jerome, Montaigne, and Zora Neale Hurston on the Educational Virtue of Following Your Whims
Too Much to Read? How Reading Habits Change
A Narrow Review of Joel Halldorf’s ‘Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age’
He Sold 55 Million Books, but His Government Wouldn’t Let Him Publish
Japan’s Greatest (and Definitely Latest) Export—Detective Writer Seishi Yokomizo
All the Horrifying Things We Do to Our Books
How Much Damage Can You Do to a Book and Still Live with Yourself?
Both Converted, then One Wrote 22 Novels and the Other Burned Her Books
Muriel Spark, Rosemary Tonks, and Two Radically Different Encounters with Faith
How to Win a Billion Dollars and Ruin Your Life
The Perfect Bet: A Review of A. Natasha Joukovsky’s Satire ‘Medium Rare’