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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Birds of a Feather
Here is the most exciting sentence I will write all week: Sarah Polley is set to direct an adaptation of The Bell Jar. Here is the headline you’ll see everywhere else: Billie Eilish is set to star. Can she act? Who knows. Does it matter? Probably not. If Wuthering Heights can survive Emerald Fennell’s Hot Mess Express—and it certainly can; no adaptation, however bad, has yet ruined the legacy of the book—Sylvia Plath’s beloved novel will be fine. And with Polley at the helm, it might actually be good. Can you name a better author-director pairing than Sylvia Plath and Sarah Polley? I’ll wait.
Wild if True
This is a Project Hail Mary fan account for the next few weeks, and wow, is the press tour for the adaptation a gift. First there was Ryan Gosling being interviewed by a reported stranded in the desert, and now Ray Porter, who delivered a god-tier performance narrating the audiobook edition, has revealed that he went into the studio for it without having read the novel. I’m choosing to suspend my disbelief and lean into my ignorance of the ins and outs of audiobook production because, frankly, it’s fun to believe that one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with an audiobook is the product of the narrator having his own organic experience with the story and characters. Want to know what all the hype is about before you see the movie? There’s a Zero to Well-Read episode to catch you up.
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Deep Sigh
Welcome to today’s edition of Old Man Shakes Fist at Clouds. I’ve run the whole gamut of reactions to Luke Winkie’s piece in Slate about romance readers’ increasing preference for first-person narration, and I still don’t know what I think after reading it multiple times and sleeping on it. Mostly, I’m tired.
Winkie doesn’t present any textual meta-analysis or sales data to support his statements about the frequency or popularity of first-person narration. He conveniently ignores the fact that while the video at the center of his argument, created by BookToker Jennifer Lee, has on-screen text declaring her hatred of third-person POV, the full caption notes that third-person is fine, actually, it’s just not her preference. (Shouts to my colleague Danika Ellis for catching this detail.) Winkie’s choice to use Lee’s quote, which I do realize she gave willingly, that “Sometimes when I’m seeking out a new book, I want it to be as dumbed down as possible” feels cheap and lab-designed to prey on cultural anxiety about brain rot and the decline of reading.
I have plenty concerns about what the contemporary media landscape is doing to our ability to think critically. I cringed when I saw that a romantasy book I received recently had a bullet-pointed list of tropes on the back cover in lieu of an actual synopsis. But I also remember being a young woman who liked things that didn’t make sense to the middle-aged people who had power and influence in the media. Now that I’m a middle-aged woman with a big-fish-in-a-small-pond amount of power and influence in the media, I can’t shake the feeling that this piece is more of an exercise in bad-faith reading and sexist paternalism than it is really about the state of reading, or of our souls.