Sunday Salon (1:6)

RBR Sunday Salon

Volume 1, Issue 6

This week’s Sunday Salon is jam-packed with interesting reads from a variety of topics, including science, literature, writing, and my very own contributions here at Roof Beam Reader. It was a very busy week for me personally and professionally, but somehow I managed to read a lot of fascinating articles that I’d like to share with you all. For my own contributions, please scroll through to the bottom.

I look forward to hearing about what you’ve read/written this week, or what you think about the links I’ve shared. Please feel free to comment below. Happy September!

Blog Posts I Loved

• Fanda Classiclit:  6 Degree of Separation: From The Origin to…. “I have just finished a wonderful book, of which I still need time to digest: Irving Stone’s The Origin—a historical account on Charles Darwin. As always with great books, it’d take me much time and efforts to review. On the other hand, my head is full of it and I was eager to write something. I have just finished a wonderful book, of which I still need time to digest: Irving Stone’s The Origin—a historical account on Charles Darwin. As always with great books, it’d take me much time and efforts to review. On the other hand, my head is full of it and I was eager to write something.”
• Bookish Byron: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. “Considering this was Gaskell’s debut novel, I think it’s very telling of her ability as a writer. She often, more times than not, goes against the grain. She lived in Manchester, at the heart of the industrial revolution, and saw the negative impacts it had on the lives of the working class.”
• Nut Free Nerd: A Classic Couple: The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. “This classic/contemporary duo always reminds me of the start of the school year, which makes this the perfect time to write about them here. I’m sure this pairing has been done many times before, but I still think there are some interesting parallels worth discussing.”

Literary Miscellany

• Tor: Problematic Classics: Four Questions to Ask When Beloved Books Haven’t Aged Well. “Most of us who love speculative fiction run into this problem at some point. There are classics of the genre that are uncomfortable for various reasons. Some of them are straight-out racist, or unrepentantly misogynistic, or homophobic, or all of the above. How and why and when we come to these realizations can change depending on who we are.”
• Literary Hub: What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Really Do? “The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes. Proust’s description of “that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude” depicts an intimate emotional dimension within the reading experience: the capacity to communicate and to feel with another without moving an inch out of our private worlds.”
• Scary Mommy: 20 LGBTQ Books for Kids from Preschooler to High School. “[Neither you nor your kid needs to be queer to enjoy these books. In fact, it if you are not queer, you should read them. Understand and see us. Then teach kindness and acceptance. LGBTQ books should be part of all kids’ reading materials and educational narrative.”

History & Politics

• The Atlantic: How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism. “In my book, I’m trying to highlight this tension between the broad, overarching social structures that organize all of our lives and the individual choices that people make from within these structures.”
• The Intercept: A Grassroots Uprising in Amish Country Begins to Find Meaning in Politics. “Sitting in church that weekend, she felt betrayed. The values being professed by the congregation were a lie. Looking around at her longtime friends and fellow parishioners, she wondered, how did you vote for him? After a lifetime of ministry, including missionary work in Japan, she left her church.”

Culture & Society

• Literary Hub: Grammar Purity is One Big Ponzi Scheme. “There’s no separating this debate from issues of class, race, geography, and socioeconomic status. The minute someone says x is standard and y is not, they’re making a judgment call about whose English reigns supreme. Just as the winners write the history books, the most powerful group of English language users write the grammar books.”
• Oxford English Dictionary: A Brief History of Singular “They.” “Since forms may exist in speech long before they’re written down, it’s likely that singular they was common even before the late fourteenth century. That makes an old form even older.”
• The Atlantic: Why Some Parents Turn Boys’ Names Into Girls’ Names. “She says that some parents “celebrate the idea of naming a baby girl James,” for instance, as an attempt to upset gender expectations by showing that girls can take on traits that are traditionally perceived as masculine. What’s noticeably absent, though, is a boomlet operating in the other direction.”

Science, Tech., & Nature

• Scientific American: What Lucid Dreams Look Like. “Last month, for the first time in over a year, I had lucid dreams for two nights in a row. A lucid dream, or realizing that you’re dreaming while still inside of the dream, is not an unusual experience: most people will have at least one lucid dream in their lives.”
• The Atlantic: Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read. “Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain.”

Teaching & Writing

• Literary Hub: Why Teaching (Writing) Matters: A Full Confession. “We live in an increasingly literate world that is more and more puzzled by complexity or meaning. I tell my students that today’s readers and writers are like members of a medieval guild, sustaining one another through a Dark Age.”
• Literary Hub: The Debut Novelist’s Guide to Battling Imposter Syndrome. “Alongside the excitement of publication, I didn’t expect that the feelings of vulnerability and panic that had been an integral part of my writing life would intensify. Somehow I’d hoped they would lessen, or vanish altogether. Instead I feel perishable and exposed.”

Posts from Roof Beam Reader

• Dorian Gray, In Theory (Part 4 of 5)
• Folio Fridays: The Thomas Hardy Collection
• September Checkpoint, #TBR2018RBR

Currently Reading

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• So Big by Edna Ferber (for #CCSPIN)

Thank you for stopping by and taking part in another SUNDAY SALON. There was much to choose from this week, and I hope I have presented you with a decent selection. Some of these I found interesting and engaging, others troubling and bothersome. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these or the other things you’ve read this week!

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