Word: readerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...point out that "Was Twain a racist?" is a ridiculous question. He was raised in Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s. Of course he was racist - at least for some of his life. And so is Huckleberry Finn, which is part of what makes the book so brilliant. The reader, through Huck, comes to see how absurd racism is as Jim is fully humanized on their trip down the river together. Twain's point is that racism is socially conditioned and is contrary to the natural inclinations of the human heart. Huck defies the laws and customs of his people...
...Administration, fully aware that as many as a third of the detainees in Guantánamo may have had no connection to terrorism, still proceeded with medieval treatment that the Red Cross warned was "categorically" torture. Mayer's work (nearly 400 pages of sometimes graphic detail) may defeat the casual reader. But her account of secret prisons, black-hooded renditions in the middle of the night and unexplained detainee deaths is necessary reading for those who would understand how the Bush Administration came to turn away from the light...
...contrast, has it in spades. Hooper's account of the real-life events surrounding the death in custody of an Aboriginal man nearly four years ago is the more powerful for her not making explicit all of her conclusions about the case. Without these in the way, the reader's own feelings have room to grow. Anger and sadness coalesce into something like despair: in 21st century Australia, how could this story have played...
...obscenity, blasphemy, homophobia, misogyny and racial insults, you don't have to dig too deep. Shortly after midnight on Sept. 11, 2007, a teenager in Pflugerville, Texas, posted a photo of some pipe bombs and announced that he was going to shoot up his school in the morning. A reader in Arizona called the Pflugerville police, who arrested the teenager. (So that's another thing that's against the rules...
...look at a book, chapter by chapter, "you don't get any guidance at all. What keeps you going?" Wroblewski says that the middle level of narrative is the trickiest part to parse, from an engineering perspective, because it's murkier and harder to define. What impels a reader to read on? "It can't be drama," he says, "because what is drama...