A Week in the Books: Links I Loved the Week of 8/10/18
Links I love this week including millenial reading habits, trigger warnings, Jane Eyre, and the Bel Canto trailer. Plus, follow Mind Joggle on Flipboard.
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I’ve been enjoying some lighter summer reading lately–I hope you have as well! Here are this week’s bookish links to kick off your weekend.
This isn’t exactly a link to new content, but to a new way to follow the blog. I’ve been using Flipboard for a couple months now and I love it for skimming news and finding articles on topics that interest me. I just became a publisher on Flipboard, so if you use it as well, please follow me! You can follow just the Mind Joggle magazine to get updates in your feed, or can you follow my full profile to see everything I’m flipping.
Millenial Reading Habits Have Changed the Definition of a Classic – Quartz
This isn’t the best headline, but it is an interesting read on the changing lifecycle of books on the bestseller lists. While it may affect the designation of future “classics,” overall I think the quicker cycle might be a good thing by allowing more new and diverse authors to top the lists. What do you think?
When Literature Takes You By Surprise: Or, the Case Against Trigger Warnings – The Conversation
I don’t have strong feelings about trigger warnings for my own sake, but I am sensitive to the need for some other readers to have them when books depict especially extreme situations–as with a book like A Little Life. But not everything that triggers can be given a warning, as this writer found, and sometimes there is value in the surprise.
Such moments can make us feel awful, and uncomfortable, and can disrupt our carefully managed public and professional performances of the self, but they can also generate strong emotional connections between people, across time and different cultures.
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – Keeping Up with the Penquins
Sheree is working through a list of classics that she’s never read, and while you might think rehashing these widely read books might be dull, her reviews are anything but. Between Sheree’s commentary and the Amazon review gems she tacks on at the end, it’s always fun to take a peek at a new perspective on a well-worn classic.
Bel Canto Trailer
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is one of my all-time favorite books and I’m excited to see the screen adaptation (let’s be honest: in several years when it comes to Netflix). Check out the trailer:
On the blog:
Creating a Reading Culture at Work
Last year: I also just finished Jane Eyre, plus Ove, a much-loved WWII novel, and two excellent mysteries, in my July 2017 roundup.
What are you reading this weekend?
I’ve never heard of Flipboard before. It looks a little like Bloglovin. I like it! The trailer for Bel Canto looks good. I love Julianne Moore.
I like it much better than Bloglovin’, because it includes articles on a topic from blogs and from bigger sites. I find a lot of interesting things from sites I don’t normally visit.
This may be somewhat controversial, but I’m against trigger warnings. They totally spoil books in a lot of cases. And, I feel like I can say this because something did happen to me years ago that would make me a prime candidate for trigger warnings, but I read about this particular thing happening to people in books all the time and it doesn’t make me crumble in any way. It actually gives me more perspective on what I went through.
I’m sure many people will disagree, but just my opinion…
I can relate to that–I’m not bothered by reading about things that could potentially be triggering for me. I think it’s about how people are handling whatever it is that’s triggering. Two books in particular–A Little Life and The Kindness of Strangers–have me torn on the topic, because the events unfold slowly and that’s a major part of the story, but at the same time they’re so extreme that I wouldn’t feel right recommending them to someone without at least a small warning. I don’t feel that things like language, racy scenes, or even the kind of violence we regularly see on TV require trigger warnings, but something like child abuse (especially extended scenes) seems like it should have at least some warning, somewhere.
I have mixed feelings about trigger warnings. Like being politically correct, I feel they can go too far.
I just finished Where the Crawdads Sing and it was such an immersive experience in the marshlands of North Carolina
Yes, I don’t feel like everything needs a warning. The world is messy and I want to read about it–I don’t usually need sanitized versions. It’s fine if some people want only “clean reads”–no language, sex, or violence–but I’m probably not going to be the one to warn them about those things.
I’ve heard that’s such a wonderful book–my library doesn’t have it yet, but I’m first on the hold list 🙂