“For years, Ann has been reading Robert McCrum’s series for Guardian Books, the 100 best novels written in English. He did an earlier list in 2003, available here, but has updated and modified his list more recently. Ann writes that “ What’s magical about his collection is less what he chooses than how much effort he goes into chronicling why a particular selection has made his list. Mixing current and classic, British, American and beyond, his series is a literary walk through a carefully curated library, complete with synopses, analyses and personal insights.”
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I’m less interested in these questions, however, than I am in what these concerns demonstrate clearly to me: how effectively novels help us learn and empathize. Studies have shown that reading literature helps us practice empathizing with characters and then leads us to better, more empathetic practices in our daily lives. To Kill a Mockingbird takes this a step further, making empathy a crucial part of its message.
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In which we announce some important changes to The Notebook and begin a new “Required Reading” series. We discuss what we’ve been preoccupied with this past week, weaving in Jane Franklin’s biography, Abigail Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes, Sybil Ludington, and even “A Firework’s Point of View.”
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Reading, writing and discussing poetry has the power to open windows in life-changing ways, giving readers the freedom to tell their own stories and view themselves as capable learners and contributors. Our current partnership with the East Cleveland Municipal Court and From Lemons to Lemonade (FL2L) bring Books@Work to a group of single mothers and other women whose lives rarely afford them the opportunity to read, let alone reflect.
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Last month Books@Work organized a gathering for Cleveland-area college and university professors who have taught, are teaching or plan to teach in Books@Work seminars graciously hosted by Case Western Reserve University’s Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, a major hub of humanities activity in the Northeast Ohio region. Along with an opportunity to socialize, attendees were introduced to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, a prestigious prize awarded to literature that confronts racism and celebrates diversity. We look forward to many opportunities to deepen our partnership with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and with the Baker-Nord Center in the coming year.
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New research appearing during Banned Books Week shows a correlation between challenges and a particular title’s diversity in authorship and subject matter. Because such books are rarely afforded placement in the traditional literary canon, participants rarely consider them when they tell us that they want to “read the classics.” By teaching Toni Morrison and Salmon Rushdie alongside William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne we have an opportunity to signal the importance of creating a new canon for the twenty-first century.
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In a recent interview published in the New York Times Magazine, editor Joel Lovell made a trip to Syracuse, New York to meet with the much acclaimed novelist and short story writer George Saunders. The article’s title, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You Will Read This Year” sums up the basic tenor of the piece: a reverent ode to Saunders’ talent and success. Saunders’ work is a bizarre mix of nerdy science fiction à la Kurt Vonnegut and trendy post-modernism in the style of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. The article is peppered with conversations about death, capitalism and the negative effects of western society. To end, however, Lovell writes, “The last time we met, Saunders waited in the cold with me until the bus for New York came along. We were talking about the idea of abiding, of the way that you can help people flourish just by withholding judgment, if you open yourself up to their possibilities, as Saunders put it, just as you would open yourself up to a story’s possibilities.” Suddenly any conversation over the evils of free market economy is erased. The ending refocuses Saunders at the very base of his craft and reveals that, beneath whatever the trend of the day is, fiction has, and continues to, concern itself with the basic question of empathy.
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