Sure, January is the dreariest month and February is the shortest month, but I found no shortage of thought-provoking literary commentaries to enjoy while hiding indoors and warming my feet next my space heater. As temperatures plummeted and snowstorms raged outside, I kept my intellect warm with reviews, interviews, and roundups of popular and emerging books. Particularly during the winter—which can feel endless in Boston—it’s important to maintain one’s reading habit. Don’t let your mind go cold! (Your fingers and toes, on the other hand, might need constant defrosting).
10 Classic Crime Stories That Have Just Entered the Public Domain in 2022 (Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads)
I always find it quite invigorating when conversations around classic books are reignited in literary circles. Classics should never be thought of as “relics of the past,” confined to the era in which they were written. I think this idea holds especially true for older crime books, which we can read today in order to think about how previous generations defined the genre (morally upright protagonist, treacherous and ugly villain/antagonist, etc.). The books being discussed here are quite literally “entering the public domain,” as their copyrights have recently expired and they are now free for use. Simply by publishing this article, however, Rutigliano brings to our attention several crime stories whose varied themes including spiritualism, cross-cultural exchange and the “fog of war” are worth bibliophiles’ devoted attention in 2022. Did you know that William Faulkner, renowned for Southern Gothic fiction like The Sound and the Fury, authored a crime-esque novel called Soldier’s Pay about the destructive aftereffects of WWI before publishing anything else? Can books like these be considered “crime reads” by modern standards, or do they now belong to another category? Diving into this book list is worthwhile if you like to study how genre categories and characteristics evolve over time.
Reading With…Jorge Contreras (Shelf Awareness)
I absolutely love that Shelf Awareness acquaints me with a new author each week. In the January 18th issue, I had the opportunity to learn a bit more about Jorge Contreras, a law professor/intellectual property expert who has written a groundbreaking nonfiction piece about a pivotal court case on the side. Understanding and interpreting the law for dissection in the courtroom is one thing, but being able to translate complex legal issues into a compelling book for general readers is an entirely different skill set that not every lawyer has. I was excited to see that he reads many of the same authors I do, including nonfiction master Erik Larson and sci-fi legend Kazuo Ishiguro. His commentary on the divisions between fiction and nonfiction is fascinating—to him, fiction is primarily about using a consistent voices that readers recognize right away, while nonfiction’s merit rests on the author’s ability to craft an informative narrative. Do you agree?
Be sure to check out Contreras’s book, The Genome Defense. I hope he goes on to publish many others!
Digging Up the Latin Roots of 14 Abbreviations (Merriam-Webster)
How many of us understand the etymological roots of the Latin abbreviations we toss smugly into academic papers and work emails (e.g., exempli gratia?) I certainly can’t profess to be well-versed in such knowledge, and that’s where Merriam-Webster web articles like this one come in handy. Even if you aren’t a professor, it might still be worth your while to remember that N.B. signifies something important for readers to note in a literary passage or that i.e. comes from a Latin phrase meaning “that is.” You’ll become more enlightened as a reader with this practical guide.
Dark Academia: Classics in Alex Michaelides’s “The Maidens” and Mark Prins’s “The Latinist” (Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, LA Review of Books)
Lushkov’s review focuses on two recent releases that have rocked the literary world. As a classicist, she explores the ways in which the main characters’ villainy, treachery, and other moral failings exemplify the negative stereotypes associated with teachers and students of this subject area. At the center of each novel is a professor whose greed, vanity, and pride affects his students—what Lushkov refers to as “generational trauma, the matching up of one generation’s ethical compromises with the next generation’s harm.” With these novels already becoming so firmly entrenched in today’s popular culture, Lushkov wonders if classicism can push past the toxic elitism that has come to define it in order to make room for more ideologically diverse and ethical scholarship.
