“Required Reading” is an ongoing series, in which we write about what has captured our attention lately on and outside the web.
Happy weekend! We hope you make time for some pleasure reading and learning – make the most of these late-summer days.
Last week, Jessica started reading Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, edited by Anne Trubek and Richey Piiparinen. She writes, “It is an amazing collection that’s thinking very carefully about what it means for Cleveland to be suddenly hip after so many years of economic depression. It includes a wide range of voices and all the pieces are about five pages long–perfect for reading in small sips.”
Ann is enjoying “Language is a Drug,” editor Ben Marcus’s’ introduction to the recently published anthology New American Stories. She writes, “It captured my attention because of my own reawakening to the power of the short story to evoke and to inspire – to create opportunities to immerse a reader in another time and place, with a shorter time commitment than a full-length book. Marcus’s descriptions are powerful and creative: ‘A story is simply a sequence of language that produces a chemical reaction in our bodies,’ he writes, ‘When it’s well done, it causes sorrow, elation, awe, fascination.’ At Books@Work, we increasingly turn to short stories to create opportunities for our participants to connect deeply and compare reactions – through the work of a single author or several. And as Marcus explains, ‘the same text that makes one person weep makes another blink with indifference or spit with contempt’; the short story makes a wonderful medium for our participants to explore varied and diverse perspectives.”
I’ve been at Books@Work for all of eight weeks, and I’m already notorious for insisting that we take walks during our group meetings and that I walk, walk, walk as much as possible. So when Gretchen Reynolds posted “How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain” in The New York Times blogs last week, I resisted the urge to immediately forward it to everyone. Using a recent Stanford-based study on walking in nature, Reynolds writes that “A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health.” Pair the article with Ferris Jabr’s “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” which cites the walking practices of great writers: Nabokov, Joyce and Woolf, among others.
Elsewhere on the Internet:
The AP Archive/British Movietone has released a million minutes of historical footage to the general public. Watch the Berlin Wall come down, Nelson Mandela walk out of prison and an early ‘70s fashion show.
Briallen Harper writes about spinsters for the LA Review of Books.
On LitHub, Theodora Goss analyzes “The Invention of the Modern Monster.”
If you haven’t checked out Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Netflix – well, what are you waiting for? It’s based on a series of Australian mystery novels and is set in the 20s – perfect for Downton Abbey fans.
George Anders at Forbes explains how “That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree has become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.”
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with French Novels, 1887, The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Perth [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons
