This week in 1947, a children’s book called Goodnight, Moon was published. You may have heard of it.
100% of the profits from To Ukraine, With Love will be donated to Ukrainian charities to help people recovering from the Russian invasion. Thanks to File770 for this link.
This newly discovered comet may become visible to the unaided human eye in mid-September.
Nerds of a Feather reviews the fourth of the TALES FROM THE RIVERLANDS novellas by Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates.
The Dragon Awards were announced on September 3. Timothy Zahn took the Best Science fiction Novel award for The Icarus Project. Martha Wells won Best Fantasy Novel for Witch King. The Best Horror Novel award went to T. Kingfisher for A House With Good Bones.
Larger publishers are reporting good sales but lower profits as over-ordering and inflation increase their costs.
Which would you prefer, a lawn or a meadow? Cambridge botanist Cicely Marshall know which one she would choose.
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this article when I started it, but Peter Derk is hilarious—and a lot of times, he’s not wrong. What are your selections for Worst Required Reading?
It’s… nowhere near Halloween, really, or even that close to autumn, but two seasonal harbingers have
made their appearance already; pumpkin-spice stuff, and Scary Movie lists. Here’s one of the second, from Syfy.
This derelict island fort is gaining new life as a… derelict island fort. While it is categorized as a UK monument, the current owners have no plans to restore it and make it a museum. They want to leave it to nature, a living ruin. I’m captivated by these photos.
One commenter selected at random will get a copy of the Neon Hemlock novelette Uncommon Charm.
The article on required reading for school is spot on. Classroom Shakespeare read-alongs were excruciating. I was very lucky in that the consortium of nearby schools offered us after-school bus rides to performances of the big name Shakespeare plays at one of the member schools, which was exciting. But that was actors reading the lines, not kids. Many of the classics were just unbearable for me, like Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Scarlet Letter, Chaucer, The Vicar of Wakefield, Silas Marner…many more of that ilk. A Tale of Two Cities was the only Dickens book I ever enjoyed, which gave it a special cachet for me. Some more interesting books, like Moby Dick, The Turn of the Screw, and The Sun Also Rises, got ruined by the tedious analysis that one was forced to go through (even though that showed me I often skimmed over parts of what I was reading and could miss major plot points by doing so, a problem that still occasionally catches me). But a great part of my resentment toward this forced reading was the pointlessness of it all. What was the purpose of it? Especially if you’re a heavy reader on your own time anyway. I think I’ve read that almost 50% of American adults never read another fiction book once they’re out of school, and to me the way it’s forced on kids in school probably has a lot to do with that.
I got accidentally lucky with Shakespeare. My English teacher had us do the read-along. Then we had to act out some scenes from various plays, but put into modern language–I think to somehow prove we understood what was going on. (I went to a girls’ school.) When two girls acted out an early scene in some play and emphasized the (unmissable!) sexual innuendos, the teach shut down THAT project.
But, out at Armstrong Woods, a state park near my house, a theatrical troupe from San Francisco was putting on a whole bunch of the plays in the outdoor amphitheater under the redwoods. I saw Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream. The actors were drunk or high about half the time, but they were good–rowdy and bawdy, so it probably was closer to an historical performance. Anyway, it meant I GOT the plays. My love of Shakespeare comes from them, not the classroom.
Read all the time but I almost never finished a book assigned to me in high school. I didn’t mind The Scarlet Letter because a very good adaption had been on PBS about the same time. One of the books that I hated least in 11/12th grade was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but I was treating it as a horror story and a forewarning. In Main Street, a city girl marries a country doctor and moves with him to a tiny town in Minnesota. My grandparents lived in an even smaller town than the one in that book and I *never* want to live anywhere like that.
Your interpretation of it as quiet horror is absolutely correct.
The synopsis for Uncommon Charm sounds very interesting and funny.
I enjoyed most of the required reading in school (apart from the Death by Newbery Medal trope) but I’m so glad I had a library so that I could read other things as well, which developed my love of reading. That’s why it’s a travesty to take libraries away from children in Texas and replace them with discipline centres.
I like books where the setting is slightly odd, like there are mammoths.
Congratulations to the award winners, they seem well deserved!
She incorporated the mammoths into one of the earlier novellas and I appreciated it very much. These have a completely different tone from THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL and SIREN QUEEN.
Lady Morar, if you live in the USA, you win a copy of UNCOMMON CHARM.
Please contact me (Marion) with your US address and I’ll have the book sent right away. Happy reading!