Tag Archives: reading

Novels as Dating Manuals

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2013

The predominant readers of 18th century novels were young readers trying to find answers to the questions facing them.

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Novel Readers: The Young & the Restless

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2013

The early novel appealed to the young, the ambitious, the mobile, and the urban.

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Novels: Training Ground for Citizenship

By Robin Bates | Published: March 20, 2013

Novels have an inherently liberal dimension in that they get us to identify with people very different from us.

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Reading to Feel Accepted in a Strange Land

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2013

Last year, when the book discussion group that I moderate was participating in America’s Big Read program, I was referred to this essay written for the occasion by the Indian-American literary critic Parul Sehgal, an editor at The New York Times Book Review. I particularly like how she describes feeling accepted by books, even though she […]

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Readers Hold the Key to a Book’s Meaning

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2013

Increasingly scholars are looking at what books do to us and what we do to books.

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High Art, Low Art, and Murakami

By Robin Bates | Published: June 26, 2012

Murakami’s “1Q84” seamlessly moves between high art and pop culture, complicating the issue of guilty reading pleasures.

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Depressed about Politics? Read Whitman

By Robin Bates | Published: June 12, 2012

Marilynne Robinson turns to Whitman to argue that American Democracy’s greatness lies in how it honors the individual soul.

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Mitt’s Favorite Book: Sci Fi Nostalgia

By Robin Bates | Published: May 30, 2012

Mitt Romney’s favorite novel, “Battleship Earth,” is a throwback to an America that no longer exists.

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Can Poetry Be Bad for You?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2012

The possibility that poetry can have a deleterious effect on one (the poetry of Scott and Byron anyway) is a possibility that Austen brings up in “Persuasion.”

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