November 15, 2018
by Neelima
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When Anna Burns won the Booker for her novel Milkman, there was much applause and criticism. Her book threw up the question of readability. Is great literature necessarily difficult? Sam Leith explores the layers of difficulty in a book- it … Continue reading
November 8, 2018
by Neelima
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Dystopian fiction has attained cult status. Take The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go. The new-found popularity of these novels reflects the preferences of a readership who are unable to make sense of the grim … Continue reading
November 1, 2018
by Neelima
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Reading is changing. Have you heard of a trend called Ambient literature? I hadn’t until I came across this story – The immersive new book trend you need to know about by Sarah Shaffi. This new kind of literature takes the … Continue reading
October 25, 2018
by Neelima
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The hardest part about writing a book is organizing the work into something definitive, says Louise Candlish. The structure of the book is based on so many aspects of writing like tense, time, point of view. A story narrated in the first … Continue reading
October 18, 2018
by Neelima
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Great thinkers are often misunderstood, says Julian Baggini, and this is normal as misreading is usually the case. The author of the essay mentions how Nietzche’s aphorisms have ‘never recovered from the fascist makeover’. You see what you want to … Continue reading
October 11, 2018
by Neelima
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So have you been guilty of trying to read a book completely even if you didn’t want to? That seems to be a common enough offence and one that Katie Heaney talks about in her essay Why It’s So Hard … Continue reading
October 4, 2018
by Neelima
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The Atlantic has a lovely series called By Heart which I’ve featured a couple of times here on the blog. Today I came across another gem called E. B. White’s Lesson for Debut Writers: It’s Okay to Start Small. The passage … Continue reading
September 27, 2018
by Neelima
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What a western mind may think of philosophy is circumscribed more toward the western philosophy. Philosophies from India and China are ignored when you speak about the study of philosophy in western universities. This is strange for me as an Indian … Continue reading
September 20, 2018
by Neelima
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Changing a few words in your conversation could change the way you think, says Mel Schwartz in his article Change a Word, Change Your Life. The words we need to change are not big words in the vocabulary- not nouns or adjectives … Continue reading
September 13, 2018
by Neelima
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I stumbled on an essay by Prasanta Chakravarty that deals with a relevant topic today — that of freedom of expression. Philosophers understood that persecution of free speech was a given and Leo Strauss published a book titled Persecution and the … Continue reading