Joining the club of the ChatGPT discussion, what’s a better experiment for a blog post on a book than Brave New World? As college professors and grade school teachers express their worries about Artificial Intelligence (AI) perpetuating plagiarism; being robbed from critical thinking, or how to develop the skill, seems more concerning. The latter, resulting in … Read More
Memoirs, autobiographies and biographies are all book genres that focus on someone. A person’s life, put on display. The difference lies in the way this person’s story is told. Although both memoirs and autobiographies are first person accounts, a memoir takes selected memories and musings and weaves them into a cohesive narrative. This can be a … Read More
You don’t have to be a librarian to think about the damages of war to libraries. If you love books, you must be horrified to see images of shelled buildings and piles of burning books, as one can’t help following the news about Ukraine. The images keep coming: television, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, your choice … Read More
It’s the time of year that fills me with a sense of possibility and new beginnings like no other. That’s right, Spring Training is right around the corner. I was six years old when I went to my first baseball game, got a giant Mets foam finger and a ball used in batting practice, and … Read More
Contrary to my usual morning routine, I’ve been sneaking in my reading at night. After full days, those night-time sessions have been the only hope of turning off my brain. I picked up Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night at a fabulous bookstore in Manhattan, Albertine. The experience of the bookstore itself is … Read More
How come this topic never occurred to us any earlier? After all, we are writing these blog posts for students interested in biology, the environment, plants and animals, forests and oceans. Moreover, when it comes to reading for fun, my favorite genre is definitely mysteries. I still remember when I picked up my first book … Read More
How did you see the world when you were a kid? Did you paint pictures where the sky was bluer than blue and didn’t meet the ground at the horizon? Did you believe in the Bogeyman, the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus? In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, not only are these things real, but belief … Read More
Like its older sibling, the mystery novel, crime fiction focuses on characters in high stakes situations. Whether they’re planning a heist, impersonating a dead man, or chasing a perp, these stories get our blood pumping as we delight in seeing cops, pretty crooks, cold blooded killers and ordinary people enforce, evade, or operate wholly outside … Read More
My first encounter with the work of Ursula K. Le Guin happened in my freshman year at Rutgers, when my friend handed me a book she was reading for a class and insisted I read one of the short stories in it. It was a short short story, she said, and I could finish it … Read More
This summer I spent a lot of time in the air-conditioned library working on a project in the X room, the archives and special collections of the Douglass library. Behind this always-locked door in the basement, there are stacks of rare books. One side of the room, however, is home to a collection of materials related … Read More