For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] Welcome to another installment of a collaboration between the Chicago Review of Books and the Your Favorite Book podcast. Malavika Praseed, frequent CHIRB contributor and podcast host, seeks to talk to readers and writers about the books that light a fire inside them. What’s your favorite book and why? This week’s guest is Nicola … Read more
[ad_1] When regarding works of art, Kandinsky asked the viewer, listener, reader to consider “[…] whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world.” Before this request was an imperative: “Stop thinking!” This can be read as a rejection of searching for a deeper meaning, or engaging in excessive interpretation … Read more
[ad_1] To believe colonialism is a relic of the past is as absurd as believing we live in a post-racial society. This is one of the lessons learned in Andrea Lee’s Red Island House, a novel set in the villages and on the beaches of Madagascar. Reading this book reminded me at times of the … Read more
[ad_1] In the author’s note to Festival Days, the new collection from Jo Ann Beard, there is a funny kind of dedication: Beard thanks the magazine Tin House for being willing to publish four of the pieces included in this collection “without undue fretting over genre.” I imagine Beard has been negotiating genre with publishers … Read more
[ad_1] Online and in an assortment of counter-cultural convergences, a movement to cultivate, research and celebrate fungi, the most unknown of kingdoms, grows every day. All the while pharmaceutical companies, ambitious marketers and other profit-seekers watch and wait for the right moment to strike. In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped … Read more
[ad_1] In her final, incomplete work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt sought to consider how thinking—an action so obvious its exploration appeared unnecessary—links vita activa, the active life, with vita contemplativa, the contemplative mind. Drawing on the intellectual history of ideas, Arendt posited that thinking creates neither morality nor understanding itself; but, instead, … Read more
[ad_1] Is there a more back-handed compliment than to be called a “woman before her time”? There’s something self-congratulatory in the appellation, how it’s both dismissive of an artist’s work in the moment while anticipating a better future for them that might never arrive. Yet it’s a description that seems to be trotted back out … Read more
[ad_1] Writing about writing and telling stories about stories — these kinds of narratives can feel circularly post-modern. But, as it turns out, they are actually quite conventional and ancient. Homer’s The Odyssey, the vaunted paterfamilias of storytelling in the West, is an epic whose hero’s primary genius is not as a warrior or leader, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to feel like you really know a character after reading a confessional novel. But like people, characters evolve too. In a great novel, they react and change with their conditions. Such is the case in The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thrilling sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. When … Read more
[ad_1] Courtney Zoffness has a way with beginnings. Consider the opening sentence of her essay, “Boy in Blue”: “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.” Or the instructions at the start of “Holy Body” on how to prepare your body for a mikveh, which involves not just washing every limb and hair but emptying both your … Read more