Dan D'Addario

There’s so much to read in the world–and, if you commute, so much time to get that reading done. But why not succumb to exhaustion and paralysis? Books aren’t merely made to be read–they give your bag a nice shape and structure when carried, unopened, for months!

Joyce Carol Oates is queen of prolificacy. She released a collection of gothic horror stories, Give Me Your Heart, to tepid reviews (“there’s little doubt that Oates is a well-practiced storyteller. Too well practiced, perhaps,” wrote the Times Book Review).

It makes text what most of cinema is only beginning to make subtext: the way we use the Internet now, in a manner whose outlying cases are frightening but even whose baselines are hazily distanced from humanity, grasping back towards connection.