I’ve been reading David Copperfield for the last month or two. I figured Dickens was perfect for the winter, and so far I’ve been happily proven right. Most of my Dickens reading came from a single, great college course, where we read outside of the usual suspects — Oliver Twist and Bleak House, yes, but also Martin Chuzzlewhit and Dombey and Sons, […]

There were two takes on Shel Silverstein’s simultaneously beloved and derided The Giving Tree in the Times recently, one from Anna Holmes and one from Rivka Galchen. Holmes, though characteristically well-expressed, joins a recent history of “provocative” takes on the book that misunderstand not only its text but its purpose. Galchen is closer to the mark, but suffers from the […]

So here’s this Mallory Ortberg post about lying about having read books you haven’t read. Ortberg: It is possible, I suppose, that you are the sort of self-actualized person who has never once pretended to have read or seen something she hasn’t in conversation, and that you are never anxious about your social status, and […]

So I alluded to this in my last post, but it’s worth making it more explicit: unless you can name three of Maya Angelou’s collections without Googling, and unless you are familiar with her work from before, say, 1990, you probably shouldn’t be publicly critiquing her work. Because the initial wave of commemoration for her […]

Maya Angelou has long been the type of artist whose work gets consumed by reputation. It’s been hard to have a conversation about her that doesn’t get bogged down in parody or the inevitable self-emulation that comes to prominent poets. A lot of people, I think, suspect that her image as a kind of New […]