In the Loop: September
September is National Literacy month. Read a book! Read a book to someone else! Listen to an audiobook (or listen to an audiobook near someone else)! Take a walk on the wild side, if that’s your beat: Banned Books Week is September 18–24. Stick it to The Man by reading something cheeky. We fully support getting your thrills between the covers (of a book).
We like books! We are equal opportunity book lovers and love books in their many shapes and forms. We like old books and new books. We like American books and international books. We like serious books and beach reads. We like important literature and romance novels and prize-winning stories and pulp fiction. We like bestsellers and hidden treasures. We like epic sagas and cookbooks and short stories and memoirs and biographies and graphic novels and YA fiction. We do not like the Da Vinci Code [Hey! Speak for yourself!]. We like page-turners and head-scratchers and nail-biters and tear-jerkers. We like books!
But wait, there’s more! What do Green Day, Kate Bush, Sleater-Kinney, Elton John, and the Velvet Underground have in common? They wrote songs inspired by books! You can hear their songs and more on this month’s playlist. (Do you know that each of our newsletters includes a playlist that relates to the theme of the month?) Doo-wop, lit-hop, disco, classic rock, folk—we’re fully booked.
Editing Q&A: How to Cite a Banned Book (Or Any Book)
MLA Style
Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. Balzer and Bray, 2017.
Chicago Style
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
1. Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).
Kuklin, Susan. 2014. Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out. Somerville, MA: Candlewick.
(Kuklin 2014)
APA Style
Bradbury, R. (1953). Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine.
(Bradbury, 1953)
A Playlist about Books? It Was Bound to Happen.
(Click the image to enjoy a literary-inspired playlist)
What's the Diff?
There are a lot of sneaky words out there—those that sound awfully similar to others, but with a different meaning. Here’s the dish on some of those commonly swapped-by-accident words.
Epilogue (n.): An epilogue is a concluding section of a literary work. It is an extension of the main work, and can serve multiple purposes: reveal the final fates of people and places throughout the text; offer an alternative point of view; tie up loose ends; remind readers of central ideas and themes. It might not be written from the same perspective as the rest of the text (e.g., different person’s point of view), but it still takes place within the same world/reality as the main text. It adds development by telling readers what happened after the main events.
Afterword (n.): An afterword is a concluding section of a work of fiction or nonfiction and can serve multiple purposes: provide details on the publication’s history or influence; comment on the significance of the book for the field or genre; detail how the book came to be (writing process, research, inspiration). It might be written by the author or by a different person—specifically, someone connected to the author or the subject matter. The afterword is written from the perspective of the author or contributor; it is not from the perspective of a character in the book.
Postscript (n.): Postscript literally means “after writing.” A postscript extends the body of the text as an addendum, whether by a word, paragraph, or section, or more. Postscript can also refer to your favorite copyediting duo.
Cool Guides
Stuff We Like
Authors and book promotion: a delicate and hilarious dance if you do it right. (From the guy who tried to make a payment with a drawing of a spider.)
You should be listening to Lost in the Stacks, a bookish podcast that features a mix of music, interviews, and library oddities united by a common theme.
“I don’t blame them”: The Onion presents famous authors’ reactions to their books being banned.
Can you answer all five Jeopardy questions (in the form of a question)? Or what about these Audible book questions?
Holy F*ck! Bookshelves sure do have potty mouths these days.
Here are 15 books about reproductive rights that you should probably be reading right about
Geez. Reading is not a contest, but no one told this gal. Then again, I would read a lot of books for pizza.
People leave a lot of stuff in library books.
Burn, baby, burn! A fireproof edition of the Handmaid’s Tale sold at auction for $130,000; proceeds will go toward combatting censorship.
People ban books for really stupid reasons. Did you know that Merriam-Webster’s was once banned in California for salacious definitions?
Rebecca Solnit on banned books and the “secret library of hope.”
Banned on the run? Check out this not-too-tricky Wings cover, in which the lyrics to “Band on the Run” are changed to include banned and challenged books.
Emily Dickinson has something to say about why we read.
You might say these 10 books defined the 2000s. But you would be wrong. There are four notable omissions.
Seven great gifts for your bookiest friends that also support indie bookshops.
Pay It Forward
Dr. Jason Aukerman hanging out at the Ray Bradbury Center table during ChiCon8
Meet Jason Aukerman!
Dr. Jason Aukerman (PhD, MA, MBA) is a Clinical Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) where he also serves the Director of the Ray Bradbury Center.
As director of the Ray Bradbury Center, Aukerman oversees the curation of one of the largest single-author archives in the United States. The contents of the collection include more than 150,000 pages of Ray Bradbury’s published and unpublished literary works stored in thirty-one of the author’s filing cabinets; four decades of the author’s personal and professional correspondence, as well as a number of uncollected letters dating back to the 1940s; remnants of Bradbury’s author’s stock of books, including an extensive array of foreign language editions; and his working library, comprising nearly 4000 volumes. The wider assortment of documents includes manuscripts, typescripts, story concepts, photographs, correspondence, screenplay and teleplay drafts, scrapbooks from Bradbury’s youth in which he glued cut-out newspaper comic strips to create his own books, and hundreds of keepsakes collected throughout his life.
Under Aukerman’s leadership, the Ray Bradbury Center provides dozens of public programs focused on promoting equity and inclusion through literacy advancement. Ray Bradbury believed that literacy was humanity’s best technology, and it should be appreciated, celebrated, and used. The literacy crisis in the United States remains a constant concern for many, and Aukerman works hard to position the Ray Bradbury Center to be a small but mighty resource for those who are interested in working to improve the declining literacy rates in the United States.
Find out more about the Ray Bradbury Center and even take a virtual tour!
Click over to our blog for some of Dr. Jason Aukerman's thoughts on Banned Books and the Literary Crisis!
