Arts & Culture

How to Fall Back in Love With Reading, From a Deadbeat Reader

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In recent months, I think I’ve cracked it. I can actually read without it feeling like I have to conduct some Pavlovian experiment on myself every time I open my book. In the spirit of dumb old Valentine’s Day, I will share some of my tips to fall back in love with reading. 

Columns

BERNSTEIN | The True Mystery of Z. K. Goat and Ithaca: The Novel

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It’s about the Odyssey’s Penelope and Odysseus: They’re vacationing for the Summer from the underworld, and instead of going home to Ithaca, Greece, they decide to visit Ithaca, New York. How quirky! They stay at Argos Inn in Room 214. On page 2, Penelope heads out to go work on her poems, which she does every day. “The fifteenth of August,” she thinks. “Our time here is almost done.” 

Arts & Culture

Curating a Summer Reading List

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If you, like me, are looking forward to some reading this summer, let’s embark on this ill-fated journey together. Will we achieve our reading goals? Almost certainly not. Will we still enjoy the act of resistance that is leisure in a society that values only productivity? We must — or perish.

Columns

YAO | Read All About It

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Back in ye olden days, I spent my afternoons maxing out the book limit at my local library and my evenings traveling to Oz or Narnia for hours at a time. The table by my bed perpetually labored under a precarious stack of novels that always seemed to grow higher. But soon enough, that library card spent more and more time inside some drawer or another before I eventually misplaced it. My nightstand heaved a sigh of relief as the pile of books dwindled to nothing. 

Somewhere between sixth-grade’s The Giver (which I enjoyed) and twelfth-grade’s Hamlet (which I skimmed before the exam), I put down leisure reading for good. There was no more time for such things, I reasoned.

Arts & Culture

YANDAVA | Literature in Isolation

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I often find that literature helps me make sense of the world in difficult times and gives me some comfort and solace when life feels chaotic and turbulent.