I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

Marcus, Pete, Vish and Andy are here to pull up the curtain on the third Premier League weekend of the season! But we’ve got much bigger fish to fry, like the 2023 Greenlandic top flight where one team pulled out to go on a reindeer hunt.

We preview Chelsea vs Luton Town - is it the biggest mismatch the Premier League has ever seen? - and discuss Inter Miami reaching ANOTHER final, but with Lionel Messi’s bodyguard in tow. Plus, a vintage edition of Jack’s Encyclopaedia where Vish must confront “the north”!

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On July 24, the Crystal Lake Public Library in the northwestern Chicago suburbs had a bomb threat. It came through a phone call. No bomb was found, and the incident was assumed to be isolated — just days earlier, the library had announced a new partnership with the local school districts to ensure any student who wanted a library card could acquire one, whether or not they lived within the tax boundaries.

This may have been an isolated incident at Crystal Lake, but over the last week, several more Chicagoland public libraries have received bomb threats. These include Wilmette Public Library in the northern suburbs, Warren Newport Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received a second bomb threat on August 21), Morton Grove Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received not one, but two threats), and Park Ridge Public Library, also in the northern suburbs. All of those happened Thursday, August 17, within a span of several hours, and all of the threats came via the various library “chat” reference tools.

Then on Monday, August 21, another bomb threat. This time to Oak Park Public Library in the western suburbs. The threat came via email the night before, Sunday, claiming that there were planned explosions the next day.

In under a month, that is six bomb threats within a small geographic area of Chicagoland, all at public libraries.

As of writing, there’s been no further information about the individual or groups behind these threats, and there’s been no information tying any of these incidents together. Whether or not they’re being explored is itself unclear — the above-linked article from the Chicago Tribune about the cascade of bomb threats on August 17 is, of course, paywalled.

How many adults read comics? My quick perusal of the research found a lot of older studies, but approximately six percent of millennials read comics every month.

How many adults talk about reading comics publicly?

What about graphic novels? Or graphic nonfiction?

Comics and graphic novels aren’t always seen as “reading,” even for kids. Parents, adults, and even educators fall back on tropes about how it’s not “real” reading, when in fact, the benefits of graphic novels have been long known: they can help engage reluctant readers, build vocabulary, help those with learning difficulties or diagnosed learning disabilities, encourage interaction with the text, and much more. Even for adults, graphic novels can help revitalize a reading slump, add interest to a challenging text, and make complex concepts similar by adding a visual component.

But graphic nonfiction…sounds much more “literary,” though I hate that term. It conveys a seriousness to the story or book. It’s often an apt descriptor, yes — but so might be “comic strip,” defined in Merriam-Webster as “a series of cartoons that tell a story or part of a story.”

We see the accomplishment listed among the best novels: just above the title or the author is the disclaimer “New York Times Best Seller” or “New York Times Best-selling Author.” But according to recent reports, nobody knows the inner workings of what exactly makes a book a bestseller on this list outside of those who work for The New York Times.

According to the NYT themselves, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” And that’s pretty much all they have to say about that, at least on the record. They say it takes into account sales numbers from all kinds of retail storefronts, be they big box stores, online retailers, or independent bookstores. But ever since the NYT Best Seller List made its debut in 1931, there’s been rumblings in the literary world of certain authors attempting to hack the system and “buy” their way onto the list.

According to an Esquire report from last year, the NYT has long denied using resources like ReaderLink or BookScan to accumulate sales numbers, since they aggregate data. They also only typically look at sales numbers from Amazon and other giant chains like Walmart or Target. Using resources like these would take away from the contribution of individual sales accrued at independent bookstores or specialty stores, and are therefore easy to manipulate.

“To my knowledge, The New York Times tracks sales of books, and the sales are what is ‘supposed to’ decide where those books sit on the list. However, the truth is, it’s much more editorialized,” stated a literary publicist quoted in the Esquire report. “There is quite a bit taken into consideration — i.e., are the book sales mostly bulk buys? Are they mostly indie bookstore sales? Are they mostly Amazon sales? Even which list the book would be considered for has a huge effect.”

In 1995, The New York Times Best Seller List introduced the dagger symbol, which indicates a book that has been bought in bulk and whose sales might not accurately represent its standing as a bestseller. This came after Michael Treacy and Fred Wierserma were accused of having spent a quarter of a million dollars that year on copies of their own book, The Discipline of Market Leaders.

To whoever is reading this: this is for you. While maybe that statement doesn’t have such a grand implication that, say, a 100,000-word novel would, nonetheless the meaning is the same. I spent my time, my effort, my very thoughts on this piece of writing for you to read. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, but you and I both know there’s never a guarantee there when it comes to writing. Regardless, this is for you.

Author dedications are one of the most personal and human-seeming parts of a published book. The acknowledgments, too, give an insight into the who behind the bound book in a reader’s hands in a way the author bio’s couple of sentences does not. But the dedication is so very personal, I can’t help but infer what is meant in the white space around the handful of words.

But where did this practice of writing the briefest love letter at the beginning of a novel come from? Dear reader, let’s take a little walk back through history and find out together.

I didn’t grow up a reader. I grew up a storyteller and writer, but not a reader. There are a lot of reasons for this: my undiagnosed ADHD, my parents’ strict rules around consuming any non-Christian media, lack of access to books (my tiny Christian school didn’t have a library), ignorance that there were books available for kids my age, and fear, to name a few.

In college, I majored in English. You’d think that an English major would be reading non-stop for their classes. For neurotypical English majors, you’d be right. I can only remember finishing one book for school at the time. In the campus bookstore, I brought stacks and stacks of required reading to the checkout desk. “English major?” the clerk inquired.

“English major,” I confirmed. While I bought all these books and used all of them in my classes, I never finished them. I went to class, paid attention, took copious notes, and read just enough from the books to pull quotes for supporting evidence in whatever paper I was writing. I wasn’t stupid, even though I questioned that at the time. I found coping mechanisms to get through college. I knew that if I majored in something that I could write my way through, instead of test through, there’d be a good chance I’d graduate.

It was a weight around my soul, the secret shame of being an English major who didn’t read. I decided to take up reading the classics I missed in high school (see Christian education). As many times as I picked up The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t finish. I’d fall asleep, even when reading at the dining room table.

Then I found Twilight and Chick Lit, which was at its peak, and I started to read in earnest. But the shame remained. I didn’t want to like these books. I wanted to like books I thought of as the Great American Novel. I wanted to be a serious reader and a serious writer. So I stopped reading YA and Chick Lit. But the problem was, I didn’t start reading anything else.

Road trips are often the subject of uplifting or heart-tugging stories — tales of friends bonding as they travel across the country, couples rediscovering why they love each other, or family members hashing out old arguments and ending the journey with a deeper understanding of each other. But sometimes, road trips can take a dark turn. You can break down and end up stranded in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by hostile people. You can end up fighting to survive harsh weather or hostile landscapes, risking freezing to death in the snow or being swept away by tornadoes. And let’s not even get into the terrifying possibilities that could occur after picking up a seemingly-pleasant hitchhiker.

A road trip always has the potential to turn into a horror story, and many writers have picked up on this. Horror road trips are a small but fun niche in horror, and they give the writer a lot of scope to structure their story in an interesting way. Horror road trip stories can be wide-ranging, using the scope of a long journey to build the horror; conversely, if the author decides to use the “we’ve broken down” trope, they can use the small space of the car or van to create a tight, claustrophobic story that ramps up the tension. However they play out, horror road trips can make for terrifying reads — so pick one up, settle in for the ride, and make sure not to stop the car for any strangers.