- Alex Shephard has snarky thoughts about this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature and its winner. (New Republic)
- Damion Searls has un-snarky thoughts about this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner. (The Atlantic)
- Elizabeth Blair interviews young readers to find out what they think of book challenging/banning. (NPR)
- Harris County Library, in Texas, has declared itself a book sanctuary. (via Boing Boing)
- Meanwhile, Books Unbanned, the movement of libraries offering wide access to “banned” books is growing. (Book Riot)
- Zack Budryk recounts the story of the Kanawha County Textbook War. (Teen Vogue)
- Lucy Knight reveals that Ian McEwan fundamentally misunderstands sensitivity readers and trigger warnings. (The Guardian)
- Maija Kappler ponders why some authors don’t use speech marks. Personally, I loathe this. I understand it’s a style choice but I really hate it. Would it kill these authors to throw us a quotation mark bone? (The Walrus)
- Ryan Mancini visits Massachusetts’s oldest bookstore. (MassLive)
- Josh Cook challenges booksellers to embrace politics. (Publishers Weekly)
- …and, of course, a serving of censorship news courtesy of Book Riot.
I have often founds books lacking quotation marks- confusing to read, at best. When I can’t figure out if a character spoke aloud or only held the thoughts in their head, it can throw the whole narrative off for me. Maybe that’s something the author intended, but it can be frustrating to the reader. Even after reading that piece you shared about why they choose to eschew quotation marks (and other punctuation) I admit that I still don’t quite get it.
I don’t get it either, for the same reasons! It just makes things confusing for (usually) no purpose!