We review, in short, some of the best material we’ve come across in the past week. We’ve got an award-winning short story, the story behind the KIND bar, a literary parody, an audiobook–and a round up of some favorite links.
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Tristram Shandy is preeminently concerned with the way storytelling conventions shape our self-perceptions and our perceptions of others, with the way narratives shape our lives. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Volume 6, Chapter XL, when Tristram attempts to sketch his story as he has told it thus far. Instead of the typical storyline we expect–shaped like an upside down ‘U’–Tristram gives us unusual loops and squiggles. Life isn’t neat and tidy–nor are the stories we tell about it. Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy recognize this.
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To say that we spend time reflecting on our reading experiences would be an understatement. But, when, at the beginning of the month I asked about experiences with audiobooks, everyone was surprised. Like myself, they hadn’t given much thought to their experiences with this medium, though, upon reflection, nearly everybody had something to say about it. For most of us, audiobooks were road trip staples, a necessary part of a family vacation that, in retrospect, seemed as integral to our experiences as the destination itself.
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There is something compelling and enduring (even if not literally!) about the paperback. It is the affordable, reliable, available book for the everyman. While serialized literature was a feature of nineteenth century newspapers, and while the concept of the free public (and sometimes lending) library dates to even earlier, the mass availability of serious literature in book format largely came with the advent of the paperback.
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A work of literature enabled people from different backgrounds and with different interests to engage intellectually and socially in a way they might not have otherwise. And great mysteries like Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep are especially suited to that type of engagement, as the genre requires them to be highly believable while also allowing for wide speculation. Four months later, I still find myself returning to their reflections.
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Regardless of the focus of their coverage of the Nobel Prize announcement, most American news outlets mentioned Patrick Modiano’s relative obscurity outside of France. Obscurity does not always – or generally – make great literature, and well loved and well known works often have considerable value. But literary prizes like the Nobel have the power to change what we read, rescuing titles that may have been previously inaccessible to us, and empowering us to consider new points of view.
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We have a societal narrative that says that busy, working people have no interest in high quality literature, or in challenging themselves to explore complex texts. This narrative permeates the current national dialogue on education as a means to get a job rather than learning to become a better learner (and a better worker). It fuels the humanities “crisis” about which we read so much. Underlying these messages is the insidious belief that the liberal arts – literature, the arts, history and culture, the natural and the social sciences – belong not to the working classes but somehow to the leisure class and the leisure class alone, as if critical thinking, communication, intellectual debate and skills of analysis, resilience and reinvention should be rationed or parceled out to a narrow few.
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“Likes” and “dislikes” are the currency of our digital world. But is “liking” a book a relevant question? Is it possible to gain meaning and value from a book that you do not like? Is there a better way to evaluate the impact of a book or a story?
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