My List Of Most Read Authors By Book Count

True confessions: I am a book hoarder. I do not rent books or buy e-books, I buy my books and they all sit behind my desk on carefully curated shelves, organized in a way that makes sense to me. And when I am lacking inspiration or need a moment’s breather from whatever work is occupying

Collective Memory: [The Giver] And Literature For Our Youth

Weird life announcement: I just read The Giver for the first time. It was as delightful as I expected for a book that is so widely read and regarded (except for the number one review on GoodReads and the psychopath who wrote it).  My initial take is that this is what more Young Adult literature should be-

Captain Beatty’s Style Of Governance: Suggesting To The Highly Suggestible [Fahrenheit 451]

If you have been following along with this three-part series about reading and literacy as reflected by dystopian novels, we have already established a couple points. I recommend you go back and read those posts (here and here).  But if you want the TL/DR, I established that Orwell and 1984, although the go-to expression of our

The Choice: Shakespeare Or Soma [A Brave New World]

In part 1 of this three-part series, I addressed how 1984, the defacto king of predicting our dystopian present, may fall short of the mark when assessing the reasons for our current state of ignorance and political control.  You can read that post here, but the TL/DR is that 1984 argues a top-down governmental overhaul, of what we

Nonfiction Authors Worth Reading

I have a love/hate relationship with nonfiction. I love reading nonfiction, but I have a serious problem with the values of nonfiction and the way it is written. This may be because of my tastes and interests (I am not a memoir, biography, or history buff- I’m more of a journalistic nonfiction guy), but I

If Rabbit Was Alive Today [The Rabbit Angstrom Series by John Updike]

Rabbit Angstrom became the de-facto American perspective in the literary world from 1960-1990 because of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Series, in which he wrote another installation at the end of every decade that served as a summary of the previous decade and a look forward towards the next. I was not actively reading these books as

The Ring Thing [The Fortress of Solitude]

The Fortress of Solitude is a coming of age in the city novel that captures the emotion of childhood’s isolation and desire for belonging in a uniquely powerful way. Its uniqueness is its strength. The coming of age novel is not new, often trite and draped in clichés, written by authors who are more interested in