Excited to be back after the summer break! It’s getting closer to the Fall semester at St. John’s, and I’m enjoying rereading Frankenstein. Let’s catch up with the world of great books, and I’ll share more of what I’ve been thinking about Inferno and Frankenstein.
- How to keep track of new releases. All of the suggestions here are better than what I currently do, which is keep track of Twitter and hope that cool new books show up in my weekly what-are-you-reading threads.
- Antigone on Antigone.
- Good piece on the Philip Roth biography shenanigans: “I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, but certainly there aren’t a lot of other examples I can think of of a publisher doing that.” On a related note, the New York Times reports that a new publishing company “welcomes conservative writers rejected elsewhere.” On another related note, Elin Hilderbrand will remove a line from one of her books after comments that it was antisemitic. (I am in two minds about removing the line, but think it’s likely bad that digital editions of books can be unilaterally changed. Another point for print books.)
- Vogue has a list of 31 books to read before you’re 30. (I’ve read 4, but it’s a decent list.)
- Kelsey McKinney (author of the quite-good God Spare The Girls, which I read on a break from 500-year-old literature) gives us her summer 2021 beach reads.
- Good piece on Virginia Woolf and her implicit critiques of the Mortimer Adler school of reading well.