The Pop Icon Set to Star in THE BELL JAR

Wild if True

this is project hail mary Please visit our fan accounts in the coming weeks. And wow, this press tour for the film adaptation is a gift. First, Ryan Gosling, who was reported to have been stranded in the desert, was interviewed, but now Ray Porter, who gave a god-level performance in narrating the audiobook version, revealed that he entered the studio without having read the novel. I choose to suspend disbelief and lean into my ignorance of the ins and outs of audiobook production because, frankly, I enjoy believing that one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with an audiobook is the result of a narrator having a unique, organic experience with the story and characters. Want to know what all the hype is about before you see a movie? Check out our episode from zero to well read.

deep sigh

Welcome to today’s edition of “The Old Man Shaking His Fist at the Clouds.” I’ve had all kinds of reactions to Luke Winkie’s work. slate As for how romance readers have come to prefer first-person narration, even after reading it so many times and falling asleep, I still don’t know what I’m thinking. Most of the time I’m tired.

Winkie does not present any text meta-analysis or sales data to support his statements about the frequency or popularity of first-person narration. He conveniently ignores the fact that the video at the center of his argument, created by Booktalker’s Jennifer Lee, has text on screen declaring her distaste for third-person views, but the full caption says that while third-person is fine, it’s actually just not her thing. (Shout out to my colleague Danica Ellis for figuring this detail out.) Winkie’s gleeful choice to quote Lee, “When you’re looking for a new book, sometimes you want to simplify the content as much as possible,” feels cheap and engineered by a lab to prey on cultural anxieties about brain rot and the decline of reading.

I have a lot of concerns about how the modern media environment is affecting our critical thinking abilities. I cringed when I saw on the back cover of a romance novel I recently received a bulleted list of metaphors instead of an actual plot summary. But I also remember being a young woman who liked things that were incomprehensible to middle-aged people with power and influence in the media. Now that I’m a middle-aged woman with as much power and influence in the media as a big fish in a small pond, I can’t shake the feeling that this work is more an exercise in malicious reading and sexist paternalism than it actually is about reading and the state of our souls.