By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes From the New York Times, 1877 Sharing a recent piece that my colleague, JT Torres , and I wrote about multimodal reading with a particular focus on audiobooks (you're all shocked, I know!).  The piece, Does Listening Count as Reading?: Multimodal Reading Matters , was a fun piece to author because I get to nerd out about audiobooks and got to co-write with my friend, JT, whom I first collaborated on this article last year for Inside Higher Ed . Here's an excerpt; read the rest here : " Imagine if you were told that a technology could order up a sermon for a congregation or immediately summon a long-dead historical figure to charm your dinner guests. Maybe you want a mechanical voice to dispense medical advice?  Such a technology might even render libraries irrelevant !" Certainly, the above references AI. After all, many headlines warn that AI threatens to make books obsolete. Other articles lament students' shortened attention s...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I like about The Great Gatsby at 100 is what I often like about The Great Courses in general: it gives you a deep dive into a particular topic in a way that feels accessible, but not shallow. Sheila Liming takes The Great Gatsby and looks at it through economic, class, gender, race, and cultural lenses, and the result is the exact thing I want from a book—or course—about a book: it made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby again. Does this give me new insights into the thing? In this case, it certainly did. I have read The Great Gatsby a few times, and I have taught it at different points in the past, so this was not a first encounter with the novel. But Liming’s course felt like a refresher and a set of newer insights into the text. I especially appreciated the way she moves between specific details in the novel, details from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the larger cultural world around the book. There are moments where she draws...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work. Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He i...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis  Borges’ “ The Library of Babel ” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno , and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “ Time Enough at Last. ” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible. Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels lik...