Open Thread: Hard to Finish?
What Books Do You Find Hard to Complete?
Culture
Miller's Book Review.
Celebrating All Things Literary
Recent essays
30 of 63Don 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’
A Bet on American Intellectual Life—and Beyond
A Conversation with Anna Gát on the Reading Crisis and Creating Spaces for Serious Dialog to Flourish
6 Enjoyable Ways to Read Classic Novels—or Pretty Much Anything
Intimidated? Distracted? Bored? Need Another Way In? A Practical Answer to the Postliterate Panic
Split Screen: ‘Children of Men’ as Both Book and Film
Everyone’s Talking About Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey.’ Let’s Examine P.D. James’s Classic Dystopian Novel and Its Big-Screen Adaptation
Before You Panic About That Atlantic Reading Piece
It’s Easy to Fear the Future When We Romanticize the Past
Best Way to See the Renaissance? Get the Panoramic View
The Try Everything Age: Reviewing Ada Palmer’s ‘Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age’
Everything I’ve Read So Far This Year
Update on Big-Ass Classics, Reading with My Kids, Plus Other Fiction and Nonfiction
Fake World: Everything You Think Is a Lie
Reviewing Philip K. Dick’s Fever Dream, ‘The Penultimate Truth’
Kurt Vonnegut’s Ambivalent War on AI
Reviewing His Prescient Debut Novel ‘Player Piano’
Literature: The Ultimate Answer to the Algorithm
Building a Solid Self in a Shaky Society: Reviewing Luke Burgis’s ‘The One and the Ninety-Nine’
50 Years of Creative Destruction in the Book World
Everything About Books Has Changed Since 1975, and That’s Mostly Good News
If the First Apocalypse Doesn’t Get You, the Second One Will
The Moon Was the Easy Part: Reviewing R.C. Sherriff’s Imaginative Classic ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’
Candice Millard and the Revival of History as Literature
Is History Boring? Only if You Write Boring History.
Why I’m Still Reading ‘Problematic’ Children’s Books to My Daughter
A Defense of Reading Great (and Imperfect) Classics Together—Without Turning Every Story into a Moral Purity Test
There Were Two Civil Wars, and We Weren’t Always Sure Which We Were Fighting
Damon Root’s ‘Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment’