🔖📚 100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read by James Folta (Lit Hub)

This is the kind of content carefully calibrated to please me, specifically.

🔖📚 Read Notes on Romance Novels as “Camp”.

Andrea, author of the Shelf Love newsletter, does an amazing job of arguing for romance novels as Camp.

📚🔖 Read The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy by Verlyn Flieger (Literary Hub)

Dr. Flieger says:

1. Tolkien created modern fantasy via fae-ery, the creations of secondary worlds.
2. The inclusion of hobbits in Middle Earth grounds Tolkien ’s fantasy.

🔖 Read Ten Years Out of Academia by Anne Helen Petersen.

I’m 3 years out from my doctoral defense and 6 months out from holding an academic job. I told an internet friend:

Right now it feels like librarian is the identity that was always really mine and academic was borrowed.

🔖📺 Read The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice.

For 20 years, I couldn’t say what I watched the former president do on the set of the show that changed everything. Now I can.

Woof. I don’t think stories like this will move the needle for Trump supporters, because I don’t really think anything will move the needle for Trump supporters.

But I kind of hope they turn some non-voters into voters.

Today:

• woke up way too early
• read about Romance Writers of America filing for bankruptcy and the absurd way they’re trying to blame it on Courtney Milan 🔖📚
• had my first mammogram (later than I ought) (they used cute stickers to mark my sebaceous cysts)
• caught up on Season 3 of Bridgerton 📺

🔖📚 Read Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker Made an Irreverent, Charming Kids’ Book by Stephen Bell (Harper’s Bazaar).

I’m super curious to see the book. The article only contains one sample page. It’s gorgeous and I look forward to seeing more.

📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.

🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.

It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.

🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:

The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)

“Is This The Best Use of My Time?” Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.