In Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell (Bookshop|Amazon), Gabe Henry recounts the story of the first national spelling bee in 1908, which some contestants had threatened to boycott because one of the contestants from...
English spelling is messy to say the least, and a delightful new book by Gabe Henry recounts the long history of attempts to simplify English spelling. It’s called Enough is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell...
A couple of books with great opening lines: Jaws (Bookshop|Amazon) by Peter Benchley and The Knife of Never Letting Go (Bookshop|Amazon) by Patrick Ness. This is part of a complete episode.
Need a book to lift you out of this world? Try Orbital (Bookshop|Amazon). In it, Booker-winning novelist Samantha Harvey imagines the moment-to-moment experience of living on a space station, a mixture of the mundane and the majestic, 250 miles...
Given the fact of reading mortality—-the awareness that it’s physically impossible to read all the books we’d like to—what’s the best way to choose your next book? Maryanne Wolf wrestles with modern challenges to doing...
With memorable phrases like coagulated sunlight and gilded gravel, poem “Churning Day” by Seamus Heaney is a fine example of how poets can draw out astonishing beauty from the most mundane of tasks — in this case, churning butter...
