“Harry Potter” scribe J.K. Rowling brewed up a whole new controversy Thursday after she tweeted her support for a British woman who was fired for making transphobic remarks, according to Nardine Saad at the L.A. Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The outspoken billionaire author chimed in on the trending hashtag, #IStandWithMaya, a campaign backing researcher Maya Forstater. The researcher claimed online that there are only two biological sexes and was fired by the U.K. poverty think tank that employed her for questioning government plans to allow people to self-identify as another gender.

“Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” Rowling tweeted, adding the hashtags #IStandWithMaya and #ThisIsNotaDrill to her missive.

Forstater made headlines this week after she took her grievances to an employment tribunal, but a judge ruled against her and summed up her remarks as “offensive and exclusionary.”

“Even paying due regard to the qualified right to freedom of expression, people cannot expect to be protected if their core belief involves violating others’ dignity and creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment for them,” ruled Judge James Tayler, according to the Independent.

Rowling apparently disagreed with the judge’s ruling and, although her tweet garnered more than 66,000 likes and 13,000 retweets in five hours, it was swiftly lambasted by prominent Twitter users who called out Rowling’s white feminism and believed the author mischaracterized the judge’s ruling.

“This is trash,” journalist Alex Berg of Buzzfeed wrote in response to Rowling’s tweet. “Trans women are women and trans people deserve the right to self-identify however they need. The end.”

The Human Rights Campaign also took issue with Rowling’s “sex is real” comment, tweeting: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people are non-binary. CC: JK Rowling.”

And “Grey’s Anatomy” alum Sara Ramirez replied to the bestselling writer with a wholehearted disagreement and called Rowling a bigot.

Read full story at the L.A. Times

Sure, horror movies are bad enough on their own…but there’s something ESPECIALLY scary about a truly disturbing book that forces your imagination to do all the work. The following will give you a whole new crop of nightmares to read about… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

by Iain Reid

Kindle price: $10.99

In this “dark and compelling…unputdownable” (Booklist, starred review) literary thriller, debut novelist Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Reminiscent of Jose Saramago’s early work, Michel Faber’s cult classic Under the Skin, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an edgy, haunting debut. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, this novel “packs a big psychological punch with a twisty story line and an ending that will leave readers breathless” (Library Journal, starred review).

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The Trial

by Franz Kafka

Kindle price: $6.99

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka’s nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.

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We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

Kindle price: $11.27

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child’s character is self-evident. But generalizations about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it’s your own child who just opened fire on his feellow algebra students and whose class photograph—with its unseemly grin—is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.

If the question of who’s to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.

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The Girl Next Door

by Jack Ketchum

Kindle price: $4.99

A teenage girl is held captive and brutally tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable.

This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels.

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The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

Kindle price: $12.99

The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

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Students’ reading comprehension scores show that just over one-third of students in grades four, eight, and 10 are proficient at reading, according to Tiffany Post from We Are Teachers… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Researchers and education policy makers ponder the significance of little to no improvement in reading scores for students as a whole and the widening gap between our high-performing and low-performing students. What many of these thinkers fail to consider is the way education has changed. The system ignores that developmental psychology says when we push students too much and too fast we do more harm than good. The reading pressures we put on students may be one major cause of the stagnant scores.

Too Soon

In the 1970s, kindergarten ran for half days and focused on play, walking in lines, and naps. Only 15 percent of students attended full-day kindergarten programs. By the mid 2010s, more than double that percentage of students attended state-run full-day pre-K programs. Kindergarten standards are now PreK standards, and first grade standards are now kindergarten standards. But, the biological development of four- and five-year-olds has not changed. Our expectations are unreasonable. Our students suffer failure after failure because we are in the wrong, and many develop anxiety about reading from their first experiences with it.

Too Fast

By kindergarten, students should be able to make sound-letter associations. Yet standards in many states require that kindergartners know all letters and all of their associated sounds by Christmas. Lists of site words for memorization begin with pre-K. Both of these tasks require rapid memorization that activates short-term memory and makes learning to read drill based instead of inquiry based. When it comes to reading, we move so fast that kids have little opportunity to become comfortable and find the joy in reading. Instead they are moved into analysis, being asked questions about main idea and inference in early elementary school. Learning anything too quickly creates holes in knowledge and skill that result in lower proficiency.

Too Much

Beyond early elementary school, reading is assigned at a rate that just becomes too much. By third grade, students are expected to read to learn across content areas. By sixth grade, students have different teachers for each academic area. All of these teachers expect students to complete homework, read assignments, and respond to questions. If students become discouraged by the sheer amount of academic reading, they just won’t do the assignments, let alone read voluntarily. The less practice they get, the lower their reading proficiency will be.

Read full post on We Are Teachers

Romance novelist Johanna Lindsey, who wrote 50 novels and sold more than 60 million books, died Oct. 27. She was 67… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Johanna Lindsey’s son, Alfred Lindsey, said she died from complications of treatment for stage 4 lung cancer, The New York Times reported. The family was too devastated by her death to announce it earlier, Alfred Lindsey told the newspaper.

Johanna Lindsey, who wrote 55 novels during her career, sold more than 60 million copies, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Her last novel, “Temptation’s Darling,” was published in July, the Times reported.

Johanna Helen Howard was born March 10, 1952, in Frankfurt, Germany, where her father was stationed in the Army, the newspaper reported. She moved to the United States when she was about 5, and she attended high school in Hawaii.

In 1977, Avon Books published Lindsey’s debut novel, “Captive Pride,” followed by “A Pirate’s Love,” “Brave the Wild Wind,” “Fires of Winter” and “Paradise Wild” over the next four years, the Times reported.

After writing 37 best-sellers for Avon, Lindsey joined Simon & Schuster in 2001, the newspaper reported.

Read full post here

Octavia Butler was the author of more than 15 books. If you’ve ever wanted to read more of her work, this is Alex Luppens-Dale’s guide to the best Octavia Butler books and a look at her life and legacy… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Who is Octavia Butler?

A native of Pasadena, California, Butler was an only child who was raised mostly by her mother and grandmother. Her father died when she was 7 years old. She spent much of her time as a child on jobs with her mother, who worked as a housekeeper, and reading books at the Pasadena Central Library.

She attended Pasadena City College and the Clarion Workshop. After graduating from college, she would continue to work temp jobs while getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to write. She was eventually able to leave these jobs behind to write full time. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to win a McArthur Fellowship. In 2000, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center.

Huntington Library, which has her papers in their research collection, published an image of one of her notebooks that periodically resurfaces on Twitter. In the notebook, Butler declared that “This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication. […] So be it! See to it!” and that “My books will be read by millions of people!”

Her vision more than came true. She also expressed a wish to help poor black students get an education and to travel whenever and wherever she wanted. Today, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship provides Clarion Writers’ Workshop scholarships for young writers of color. There is also a scholarship in her name at her alma mater, Pasadena City College.

Butler died in 2006 at the age of 58, having written her own dreams into existence.

Butler’s legacy lives on in so many ways. In addition to her immortal body of work and the scholarships that have been established in her name, there is also an asteroid named after her. In 2019, the Los Angeles Public Library opened the Octavia Lab, a maker space named in Butler’s honor.

Read full post on BookRiot

E.L. James’s irresistibly salacious novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which morphed from web-published fan fiction into a blockbuster book and movie franchise, is the bestselling book in the U.S. book market over the past decade, according to NPD BookScan… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Fifty Shades of Greys sold 15.2 million copies between 2010 and 2019.

In fact, NPD BookScan reports that the three volumes of E.L. James’s trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), Fifty Shades Darker (2011), and Fifty Shades Free (2012), occupy the top three positions on the top-ten list of the decade’s bestselling books. Altogether the Fifty Shades trilogy has sold nearly 35 million copies in combined print and e-book editions over the past decade.

Other titles on the decade’s top-ten list include Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games at #4 (8.7 million copies sold), and at #5 Kathryn Sockett’s 2009 novel The Help (8.7 million).

NPD reports that over the past decade 6.5 billion print books were sold in comparison to 1.8 billion e-books. And the report cites the continuing growth in the popularity of audiobooks, and notes that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have transformed how people consume books.

The report also said that while fiction represented 80% of the top selling titles in 2010, over the second half of the decade nonfiction reading—including cookbooks, self-help, and politics—had grown significantly, and the fiction share of the top-ten bestsellers had dropped to 32% in 2019. The report also cites the growth in popularity of shorter books, including poetry and self-help titles.

See full post on Publishers Weekly

Dr. Seuss gave us one of the most complex, socially important heist stories ever, according to Olivia Rutigliano from CrimeReads… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The three top-selling Christmas-themed children’s books released for the holiday season in 1957 were all stories of absence, loss, and theft: The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t by humorist Ogden Nash, The Year without a Santa Claus by soon-to-be-Pulitzer winner Phyllis McGinley, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by the beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss (the pen name of political cartoonist Ted Geisel). The three stories are all self-conscious about the precariousness of abundance, reflecting the decade’s newfound culture of plenty—the postwar snowball of American prosperity and the proliferation of the middle class—through the fear that it all might easily get taken away. Nash, McGinley, and Geisel (all born within years of one another in the very beginning of the twentieth century) had already witnessed two world wars, two periods of excessive prosperity, one nationally-traumatic economic nosedive, and the ongoing threat of intercontinental nuclear war—too familiar, by the midcentury, that “having” could, in a flash, become “having not.”

In The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t and The Year without a Santa Claus, Christmas disappears because of varying degrees of bureaucratic malfeasance. In the former, a usurper to a throne imprisons the ruler who officiates the Christmas celebration, thereby ending the holiday. In the latter, Santa Claus’s desire to slack off on his job and take a vacation means that Christmas won’t happen. (In both stories, children are able to fix these respective leadership problems and save the holiday.) In these tales, Christmas is represented as being contingent on the successful operation of a particular administration: it is a production. It must be effectively sanctioned, overseen, and staged by an authority on behalf of the people, and without these formal constructions, it cannot exist.

But How the Grinch Stole Christmas goes down a bit differently—it tells the story of an outsider with no formal power who deliberately connives to swipe Christmas from those who celebrate it, precisely because it bothers him that they do. The Grinch, a crotchety hermit who lives alone on a mountain that overlooks a village, Who-ville, that happily celebrates Christmas annually. He watches them celebrate, year after year, until he figures that if he steals everything from them, they won’t be able to celebrate. But when he makes off with all their decorations, presents, and foodstuffs, he finds that they still celebrate Christmas either way, and do so gratefully and joyfully. This shocks him…

Read full post on CrimeReads