by Jack Martin on January 24, 2012
Charlotte spins her web, Wilbur shows up the other pigs at the County Fair, and young readers rejoice. They don’t even seem to care that animals can’t talk. Why do kids get to have all the fun? After spending week after week writing online book reviews on stories about normal people that speak to other [...]
by The Reader on January 9, 2012
Edgar Allan Poe judged the greatest tragedy of existence to be humanity’s innate loneliness – our inescapable singularity. As close as one might feel to another, we largely live and die alone, sharing mere slivers of ourselves – our thoughts, fears, loves and hopes – with the outside world. Art, however, can sometimes transcend this [...]
by Guest Post on December 20, 2011
The other night I pulled my 800 page copy of Middlemarch out of my denim hobo bag and set it down on the table where those I was hanging out with promptly marveled at its heft. I told my friends that I had recently decided to read Middlemarch once a year and was in the [...]
by The Reader on December 8, 2011
Whenever I’m on the fence about buying a book, I turn to page 1 and read its opening line. Considering the amount of time authors spend obsessing over the first words of their tome, you’d think all openings would be amazing. And yet, they’re not. Constructing an original, provocative opening sentence is eons harder than [...]
by Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot on September 25, 2008
The Baltimore City Paper recently published this great article that reminds us to rethink what we read and what we read when we were kids and how those books may have changed our lives. Think about what you read when you were 12. How did you choose it? Why did you choose it? And did [...]