Latest news with #MadelineMiller
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Why it is good to see Edinburgh Book Festival embracing the BookTok generation
BookTok has become a mainstay of bookshops across the country - and it is bringing a love of reading to a new generation. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... I spent Friday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival, something that has become a near annual tradition ever since I went on trips with my school library as a child. No trip to the book festival is complete without a trip to the bookshop tent. This year there is a section for popular BookTok books, something that is becoming a familiar sight in bookshops up and down the country. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad BookTok started off as a subcommunity on TikTok, but more recently it has become shorthand for all social media content dedicated to books and reading. BookTok has brought a love of reading to a new generation. | Unsplash There has been an explosion in people's love for books since the pandemic. There are many reasons for this, but BookTok is one. A poll by The Publisher's Association found that 59 per cent of 16 to 25 year olds found a passion for reading thanks to BookTok. Forbes says #BooKTok has accumulated over 370 billion views. It is not without its critics. There are some who argue this is the end of 'proper' literature, as authors and publishers are sacrificing originality and creativity for the sake of online marketability. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is true to a certain extent. There is a diminishing level of quality in some of the literature produced to help fuel the never-ending desire of the BookTok community. I have certainly read a fair number of BookTokbooks over the past year (that I have thoroughly enjoyed) that have been badly edited with spelling and grammatical errors. There are others where printing quality has fallen short of the mark because of speed. But this is no reason to deride the readers - this is on the publishing companies who need to remember to think about quality rather than solely on profit. It is also a rather simplistic view to assume all BookTok books are anti-intellectual and not as good as 'real' books. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Let's take The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller as an example (one of my favourite books) - it is a reimagining of The Iliad and one of the most popular BookTok books. The author spent around a decade writing the book, has a masters degree in classics and teaches Latin and Greek, and now hundreds of thousands of people are reading about ancient Greece thanks to social media. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has seen a spike in popularity thanks to BookTok, despite being published 200 years ago. Readers can hardly be criticised for indulging in this just because they were inspired by an influencer online. I understand not all BookTok books are like this. Many are romance books that are written like a popular trope checklist, published at rapid speed and even copying cover designs of other popular books to hit a certain audience. Some bookshops wrongly assume these trope-heavy, quick-read romances are all BookTok is, and therefore fill their BookTok section accordingly. But there is so much more to BookTok in reality and it is an unfortunate symptom of the somewhat misogynistic view of the kind of readers on these platforms. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Personally, it is great to see Edinburgh Book Festival embracing BookTok. It is bringing a love of reading to a new generation and that, whether it is a literary classic or a pop romance, should be celebrated.
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He Didn't Find Love on ‘Love Island.' He Founded a Book Club Instead.
After he was voted off the dating show 'Love Island USA' last month, Jeremiah Brown wasn't sure what to do with his newfound fame. During his 16 days as a contestant, he'd gained more than two million followers on TikTok, up from just 44 before he went on the show. Shortly after his exit, a suggestion from a follower on social media immediately grabbed him. 'Somebody said, you should start a book club, and I was like, oh my gosh, lightbulb,' Brown said in an interview. 'The second I read this idea, I was like yeah, we got to do this.' When Brown posted about his book club in early July, the announcement generated wild enthusiasm. Soon, the club had around 120,000 members. 'Y'all some nerds,' Brown told his followers. After polling club members on what genre they wanted to read (romance, naturally), Brown gave them a list of books to vote on, which included BookTok favorites like 'It Ends With Us,' 'Beach Read,' 'Twisted Love' and 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.' The winner, by several thousand votes, was 'The Song of Achilles,' by Madeline Miller. The novel, which is more of an epic tragedy than a romance, has already attracted a wide audience, selling more than 4 million copies since its release in 2012. Set during the Trojan War, it imagines a doomed love affair between the warrior Achilles and his devoted companion Patroclus. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Penelope's Bones' Review: Queens of the Bronze Age
Novels that explore Greek mythology from the point of view of 'silenced' women now constitute their own popular genre: Madeline Miller's 'Circe' (2018), Natalie Haynes's 'A Thousand Ships' (2019) and Jennifer Saint's 'Atalanta' (2023), to name but a few. Emily Hauser, a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, has also contributed to this trend, but her latest work, 'Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It' is something else altogether: a riveting narrative of the female figures of Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' that draws on recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries. The author explores the roles and personalities of Homer's characters—the Greek beauty Helen, the enslaved girl Briseis, the Trojan royal Hecuba, the witch Circe, Odysseus' patient wife, Penelope, and so on—by examining real women of the Bronze Age archaeological and historical record. The result is a close study of the epic poems, a meditation on the lives of women then and now, an engaging history of scholarship, and an overview of the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean and beyond. Written with a novelist's flare, 'Penelope's Bones,' with its linked chapters, makes for a surprising page-turner. The bones of the title refer to the remains of a woman 'known to the researchers, somewhat unromantically, as I9033,' found in a royal burial site in the Peloponnese in Greece. Radiocarbon dating places the deceased at around the 14th century B.C., and she is buried with a queen's paraphernalia: 'gold leaf, beads of gold and semiprecious stones.' Ms. Hauser is not making the argument that this skeleton is actually the Penelope of the 'Odyssey' (her death, in any case, predates the traditional time of the Trojan War by a good century or two). The author is not, in other words, like the adventurer-cum-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), who conducted excavations to prove the literal veracity of the epic poems. Rather, she is digging for the deeper truths in the poems, the real Bronze Age women affected by the violent deeds of men. Many other Mycenaean palaces and burials of the Greek Bronze Age, as well as countless artifacts and skeletal remains, have come to light since Schliemann's time. Ms. Hauser has the benefit not only of archaeological hindsight but of advances in science such as DNA testing. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the assumptions of early (usually male) archaeologists skewed their readings of excavations.
Business Insider
12-05-2025
- General
- Business Insider
I spent over a decade tracking my reading habits and goals. Now that I've stopped, I love books more than ever.
My past self would never believe it, but I couldn't tell you how many books I've read this year. After all, I've been hooked on reading since I was 7 years old, and for most of my life, I've kept track of all the books I've finished. It started in middle school with reading logs and journals I completed for homework. Then, I took it a step further and started keeping track of books I borrowed from the library, and later developed a reading diary. I loved that I could look back on different versions of myself and see how my reading preferences and taste in books changed over time. My love for book tracking only intensified when I discovered Goodreads in 2014. The website (and app) allowed me to more easily track my books, reviews, and reading habits from my computer or phone. Years later, I still read a lot. If I were to guess, I'd say I finish an average of 30 to 40 books a year, but I have no way of knowing the exact number because I no longer track the books I read. Tracking my reading habits made the experience less about fun and more about meeting a metric After many years of tracking the books I'd read, I began to lose some of the joy that came with reading. I became obsessed with hitting the reading goals I'd set for myself on Goodreads every January. Whenever I fell into a reading slump, I'd force myself to read books I didn't even want to read yet just to achieve an arbitrary metric. Last year, I spent a whole week trying to determine if finishing Madeline Miller's short story"Galatea" should count toward my reading goal for the year. Why did it matter so much? I was overthinking and missing the point of reading in the first place. All in all, actively tracking the books I read was making me unhappy, so I decided to stop. Ditching the metrics and goals have been freeing in many ways Of course, some of this is my fault. Setting reading goals is optional, and book tracking doesn't need to be as rigid as I'd defined it. Many people find happiness and satisfaction in all of the metrics and digital shelves, but stepping away from them has been great for me. Now, I read because I want to enjoy the content, go on adventures, and learn more about myself, not because I'm trying to achieve something. I no longer feel pressured to keep up with new books or stress over whether re-reading old favorites "counts" toward a goal — I just enjoy the hobby I'd always loved so much. I've given myself the freedom to branch out and read more than just books, too. I've expanded my interests to enjoy articles, think pieces, and poems I previously wouldn't have read because they weren't things I felt like I could easily track. Now that I've removed book tracking from my life, I don't see myself ever going back. After all, what good is reading so much if it doesn't bring me joy?
