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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Learn a Poem by Heart
Like the smart and sophisticated socialite who finds their way to a piano and provides the perfect, perhaps jazzy, soundtrack to a gathering of self-aware intellectuals, you too can be a most cultured party-goer–and you don’t even have to pretend you’re going to learn a new instrument at your grown age! All you have to do is memorize a poem and bounce from conversation to conversation in search of an opening to elocute. As it happens, The New York Times recently concluded a weeklong exercise designed to help you learn a poem by heart. With its “We were very tired, we were very merry” refrain, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” is the perfect poem to recite at the end of a party when the conversation has lulled and people are eyeing the door. Just close your eyes, slip into the character of the exhausted artiste at a salon, and deliver your freshly-memorized poem to the weary. You’ll clear the room in no time. Jokes aside, I found the exercise delightful and mentally nourishing. I haven’t had reason to memorize a poem since I was in school, and it turns out this practice is also a good way to take your mind off of other troubles, if even for a moment. I might do more of this in my own time as I’m currently reading The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), translated by Wendy Chen, which is full of short, vivid, meditative poems.
Do We Really Need More Male Novelists?
Ella Creamer asks this question over at The Guardian. You may have heard word of Conduit Books, a new indie press that will initially focus on publishing literary fiction and memoir by male authors. Jude Cook, the novelist and critic behind Conduit, is going this direction because he sees male authors as “often overlooked” in a publishing landscape correcting for years of male domination and awareness of toxic masculinity in literature. What Creamer accomplishes in this piece is to point out that the data behind the publishing rates and success of male novelists doesn’t offer a clear enough picture to make my eyes go saucer-sized with recognition of a real problem. I came away from the article with the same belief I had going in: men aren’t reading as many novels as women. I don’t want to rehash the men aren’t reading discourse of earlier this year, but you can explore it at Vox. Also, in a blog post from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sunil Iyengar reports these numbers, “In 2017, the share of women reading novels or short stories was down to 50.0 percent, and, in 2022, to 46.9 percent. Men readers saw their fiction-reading rate slip from 35.1 percent in 2012 to 33.0 percent in 2017 and then to 27.7 percent in 2022.” I recommend reading the full article at The Guardian if just for the choice quotes from authors and publishing professionals.
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Let’s Poke Fun at a Nostalgic Fave
I do so love a literary lampoon, especially when it brings to mind an old favorite from my (and so many others’) young reader years. I also love McSweeney’s which, in part, is an endless font of satire that can make me lol and lolsob when I need it most. Today, we got Choose Your Own Adventure satire–you know, those books you stacked the quality of your instincts against but ultimately used to indulge your latent nihilism by exploring worst possible outcomes. Now you can skip the moral dilemmas and existential crises and get right to the nihilism with Justin Bendell who compiles endings that, while missing from the real books, match the level of dire kids confronted in those books, starting with Artax-flavored grief. These endings are not for the kids, but they’re absolutely for me. Here’s your dose of clowns, oxen, and dysentery.
In Case You’re Stressed About Mother’s Day
Uh oh. Mother’s Day is around the corner and you still haven’t decided what to get the maternal figure in your life. If that person is as bookish as you are, or striving to be, we’ve got you covered. Here’s your guide to bookish last-minute Mother’s Day gifts.
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