Literature

Do Yourself a Favor and Memorize a Poem 16
- Culture, Education, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- June 30, 2025
Several times a year I require my students to memorize a poem. Sometimes I choose for them (say, “Death Be Not Proud,” by John Donne). Sometimes I hand them an anthology and let them choose. I don’t explain rhyme scheme or poetic devices. I only ask that the students know the meaning of every word
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Bring Back Shaming 20
- Culture, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized, Western Civilization
- May 13, 2025
Author Sarah Wilder published an article on this site last week titled, “BookTok and the Destruction of Literature,” lamenting a TikTok trend among mostly female readers who share an obsessive fascination with sexually explicit fantasy novels. “The decline in reading in America is a troubling fact,” notes Wilder, an avid reader of classic literature, “so a social
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BookTok and the Destruction of Literature 19
- Culture, Entertainment, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- May 7, 2025
The decline in reading in America is a troubling fact, so a social media trend that encourages people to frequent bookstores and read well into the night should be a welcome one, right? Yet “BookTok,” a TikTok term that refers to a community of mostly women who read dark, sexually-explicit fantasy novels, is anything but
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April Is National Poetry Month, and We’re All Invited to the Party 18
- Culture, Education, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- April 1, 2025
“April is the cruelest month,” begins T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” Literal-minded folks living in Minnesota in January or Alabama in August might get a few chuckles from that line. Cruelty and chuckles aside, April is also National Poetry Month (NPM). Initiated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, “National Poetry Month
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Boys Will Be Boys … or Will They?13
- Education, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- March 28, 2025
In January, my young friend Anna and I inventoried authors by gender on the “New Fiction” shelves of our public library. That count came to 123 novels and short story collections written by women, 64 authored by men. The disparity came as no thunderbolt to me, as I’d noticed for several years the number of
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Why ‘Popcorn Books’ Are Good for You 24
- Culture, Featured, Literature, Uncategorized
- March 21, 2025
If literature were a food pyramid, a ranking of vitamins and nutrients for the mind and soul, the classics would be the equivalent of steak, eggs, and fish, books high in intellectual protein like Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter,” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Next would come the fruit
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