If you learn one thing from this week’s episode of the “MashReads Podcast” we hope it’s that you always remember to bring a towel when you travel.
That’s just one of the many important tips that we learned when discussing Douglas Adams’ The Hit…
Category: Mashreads
‘Teach This Poem’ is on a mission to help teachers and students understand the world
The National Book Foundation announced on Thursday the winner of the 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize, its annual social-impact-through-literature award.
Each year the foundation honors one individual or organization that has developed an inno…
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s ‘The Merry Spinster’ puts horrific twists on your favorite fairy tales
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Everyone knows how classic fairytales are supposed to go: they start with “Once upon a time” and end with a “happily ever after.”
But for Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s story collection The Merry Spinster, “happily ever after” comes with a heavy price.
The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories, each that riff off of the classic fairy tales you read as kids. In Ortberg’s retellings, The Little Mermaid becomes “The Daughter Cells,” a story that seems, at first, ambivalent at best about its protagonist (“Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with — if you’ve got them on hand.”) before descending in incredible violence. Meanwhile, Cinderella is merged with Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Bible‘s book of Psalms to become The Thankless Child. Read more…
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Neal Shusterman’s ‘Dry’ is a harrowing look at a world without water
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Neal Shusterman is back!
Just months after the release of his new novel Thunderhead in his Arc of the Scythe series, National Book Award-winning author Shusterman has a new novel, Dry, that explores what would happen if the United States ran out of water.
The dystopian climate tale, co-written with his son Jarrod Shusterman, follows Alyssa, a teenage girl living in California during an extreme drought, which everyone calls “the flow crisis,” and then “the Tap-Out.”
“That’s what the media’s been calling the drought, ever since people got tired of hearing the word ‘drought,'” Alyssa explains in the novel. “Kind of like the way ‘global warming’ became ‘climate change,’ and ‘war’ became ‘conflict.’ But now they’ve got a new catchphrase. A new stage in our water woes. They’re calling this the ‘Tap-Out.'” Read more…
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View More Neal Shusterman’s ‘Dry’ is a harrowing look at a world without water16 book recommendations for when you have absolutely no clue what you want to read
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There’s a funny thing that happens when you tell someone you write about books. Almost always, they immediately ask, “Do you have any book recommendations?”
The short answer is yes, we always have recommendations.
The long answer is *internal panicking* WHERE DO WE EVEN BEGIN?!
SEE ALSO: 21 books you need to read this spring
That’s why we invited a panel of past guests — Mashable deputy science editor Miriam Kramer, social good editor Matt Petronzio, commerce editor Nicole Cammorata, and culture reporter Chloe Bryan — to the latest MashReads Podcast to help us line up a list of really great book recommendations. Read more…
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Peek inside Jacqueline Woodson’s upcoming book for kids who feel alone ‘The Day You Begin’
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There are some days when you feel like you just don’t fit in.
Maybe you look around you and you don’t see anyone who looks like you. Or maybe the food you eat and the games you play are different than everybody else’s.
Fortunately, for anybody struggling with feeling alone, acclaimed author and newly appointed National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jacqueline Woodson is back with The Day You Begin, a new picture book, illustrated by Rafael López, to remind you to stay confident, even when you feel misunderstood.
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21 books you need to read this spring
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Spring is here and that can only mean one thing: time to shake yourself out of hibernation and bust out that spring reading.
But with so many great books coming out in 2018, it can be hard to figure out just which ones you should pick up.
SEE ALSO: 9 books to read before seeing the movie
Don’t worry though — The MashReads Podcast has got you covered.
This week on the MashReads Podcast, we are joined by Cristina Arreola, books editor at Bustle, to chat about spring reading. Join us in the episode below as we talk about the books we’ve read recently, the books that’ve been on our spring reading wishlist, the classic books we’ve been revisiting, and the upcoming books you need to know about. Read more…
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‘The Paper Menagerie’ is a heartbreaking story of family and immigration, told in just a few pages
You don’t always need hundreds of pages to tell a moving story. Or at least that’s the case with “The Paper Menagerie,” the titular story of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.
“Paper Menagerie” is a short story about a bi-racial boy na…
The supreme weirdness of reading ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ as an adult
The first time I read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid, I remember being utterly terrified.
Beginning with the iconic opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s sci-fi tale takes us on a harrowing journey with ir…
‘Emergency Contact’ is a YA novel about falling in love in the age of texting
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Writer Mary H.K. Choi has a theory about texting:
“The person who is allowed to text you at 1 a.m. in the morning without that ‘you up’ shit, that’s a fucking steamy situation. That’s somebody you care about. Similarly, your ‘good morning’ texting person — not your blanket ‘Hey bitches, are you up’ but your first ‘good morning’ person — that’s a special person.”
It was with this in mind that Choi — who is a journalist with stories published in Vice, Wired, and more — wrote Emergency Contact, a YA novel about two people in crisis who are brought together and develop a relationship via text. Read more…
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‘Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda’ perfectly captures the angst and joy of growing up
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If there’s one word to describe Becky Albertalli’s book Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (turned rom-com Love, Simon), it’s “relatable.”
The book follows Simon, a closeted high schooler who begins an online romance with another student, who goes by the anonymous name “Blue.” When Martin, Simon’s fellow student, discovers the emails, he begins blackmailing Simon. From there, Simon must figure out how to protect his identity and who Blue is — all the while trying to navigate the messy, complicated world of high school. Read more…
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Tomi Adeyemi: “‘Children of Blood and Bone’ is an allegory for the modern black experience”
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If you count the seconds as Tomi Adeyemi opens her gold package — one (pause), two (pause), three (pause) — you’ll notice that it takes her a full 30 seconds before she’s able to speak.
As she rips at the sparkling paper, digging for the prize inside, Adeyemi whimpers and laughs and cries, but it takes a full half minute before she’s able to muster words.
When she’s finally able to talk, Adeyemi’s speech comes out as a stunned gasp.
“It’s really beautiful,” she says, sniffling. “And it’s real.”
In her hands, for the first time ever, is a book, HER book, Children of Blood and Bone. And it feels like magic. Read more…
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