the book i have read essay

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6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’

A Book I Have Recently Read: Books are the best resources of people. With which no earthly wealth can be compared. By reading books we can keep our mind healthy and happy. A good book opens the eyes of the human mind as well as expands and develops the knowledge and intellect and helps to light the mind. Many people like to read story books or other kinds of books. Reading books is a good habit. ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’ is an important paragraph for the students. In this post I have presented 6 paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’.

A Book I Have Recently Read

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read a book named “ Pather Panchali “. It was written by famous writer Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay. The novel is about a little village boy named Apu. The main characters of the book are Apu, Durga, Harihar and Sarbajaya. Harihar and Sarbajaya, a rustic couple, spent their days in miserable distress. But they dreamt of a rosy future. Apu and Durga are their children. Durga died a premature death. It was a great shock to the family. One cannot shed tears when one reads about the death of Apu’s dearest sister Durga. The novel gives us a very living picture of the beauty of a remote village in Bengal. The story reminds us of the hardship of the thousands of poor and helpless people of our country. Really it is an immortal creation of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

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I have little time to read books other than school books. But l heard the story of “Ramer Sumati” written by Saratchandra Chattapadhyay from my grandpa. The story charmed me very much. Recently I managed to have a copy of the book which I finished in a single sitting. It is entirely the story of a joint family of rural Bengal. Here are a few principal characters – Ramlal, the hero, Shyamlal, his step-brother and Narayani, the wife of Shyamlal. Apart from them there are Shyamla’s son and Digambari, his mother-in-law. Ramlal lost his mother when he was only two and a half years old. Narayani, the sister-in-law brought him up with all motherly love and affection. Digambari could not tolerate the sweet relationship between the two. Ramlal was very wayward and that was at the root of all problems. The ancestral home was partitioned and Ramlal was separated much to the pain of Narayani. The author’s portrayal of the characters of Ramlal and Narayani is simply unique. Details of the book cannot be given in this short span. But everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

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I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. I am a big fan of cricket as well. My father recently gifted me the autobiography of Sachin Tendulkar “Sachin Tendulkar – Playing It My Way” on my birthday. The book is really very interesting. Sachin Tendulkar is not only a great player but also has become an icon. So a chance to peek into the life of such an icon is always sought after. The chapters describe all the important events of his life. The reader is bound to respect the legend more after going through the book. The book not only brings out Sachin’s passion for cricket but also reveals how caring a father and gentle son he is. I will cherish the experience of reading the book forever and this will be a guide force in my life. I wish to read it once again in future.

A Book I Have Recently Read

Miranda in “The Tempest”

Reading books is my passion. I have recently read William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. It is the last play of the great playwright, which was written in 1611 at Stafford. Prospero was a learned man. He did not like to rule Milan as merely a Duke. His power was his wisdom. His brother, Antonio, took advantage of this craving for knowledge and conspired to drive him away from Milan with the help of the king of Naples, Alonoso.

Prospero and his daughter eventually took shelter in an alien island. It was a mystic land of which Prospero was little aware. Caliban was an evil spirit which was living in that island. Gradually, Prospero dominated Caliban and became a supreme power by way of his white magic. Dr. Faustus of Marlowe exercised necromancy, but Prospero used his magic for the welfare of the world. Hence his magic was a boon not a bane. His daughter, Miranda, was a lovable and beautiful young lady. Caliban wanted to seduce Miranda, but in vain. At last Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, came to the mysterious land. Miranda was very much appalled to see a beautiful young man for the first time. Seeing Ferdinand, she cried out, “O brave new world.” Later Miranda and Ferdinand fell in love. Prospero wanted to test Ferdinand’s devotion to his daughter. Ferdinand won the mind of Prospero. Using his white magic, Prospero taught everyone including his brother good lessons. Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian realized their misdeed. Gonzalo, who helped Prospero once to escape from his cruel brother, was rewarded.

Finally, everyone was reconciled. Prospero returned to Milan with his daughter and he freed Ariel, the spirit which helped Prospero in fulfilling his desires while living in the alien island. The happy reunion of the play implies the fact that Prospero is a major figure who by way of using his white magic helps everyone reconcile in spite of shortcomings. Honesty and goodness have been rewarded. I felt much aesthetic pleasure while reading the play. Shakespeare’s language, his style, above all, his blending of tragedy and comedy gave to my mind a soothing effect which I cannot forget ever.

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Recently I have read Bibhutibhushan’s classic novel ‘Chander Pahar’. I loved the book so much that I have lost count of the number of times I flipped through the book even after I had finished reading it.

The book ‘Chander Pahar’ records the adventures of Shankar, the main character of the novel. Shankar, a young bengali boy, faces many adventures in Africa where he goes in connection with his job on the railways. He encounters many ferocious animals like lions, black mamba etc. But the real adventure begins when Shankar accompanies Diago Alverage, a European adventurer, to the Kilimanjaro mountain in search of diamonds. In the course of the events Diago gets killed by a terrible animal called ‘Buniyp’ and Shankar is left all alone in that unknown land of adversity and danger. But he braves it with extraordinary courage and valour.

After a great struggle, he is saved from the desert. Shankar is the embodiment of courage. I love the character very much. I am attracted by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s great narrative skill. He makes the description of African jungles and Shankar’s adventures alive with his narrative skill. Author’s creativity makes Shankar’s character one of the most popular characters of Bengali literature. Whenever I read the novel, I find myself engrossed in it. My mind also travels with Shankar in the land of Africa and feels the adventure. This is why ‘Chander Pahar’ holds such a special place in my mind.

‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller

Books are our best friends. Even in today’s world of internet and mobile, the importance of books cannot be ignored. I am a genuine book lover. Reading books is my passion. Whenever I get spare time I read story books, novels etc. Of all the books I have read, I like ‘The Story of My Life’ by Helen Keller the most. The episode centres round the hard struggle of life of Helen Keller. She writes with a natural ease and power, hardly equaled by any other writer of that category. In this book we see that Helen Keller became blind and deaf after a serious illness in her childhood. However, the day when Miss Sullivan came to her as her teacher was the most memorable day in her life. After a long hard process Helen learnt to read, in raised letters in Braille method . She learnt to write also in a special type of typewriter. In the book ‘The Story of My Life’ an account of the first twenty two years of Helen Keller’s life has been given. During this time she came into contact with many noble and affectionate persons. In her autobiography Helen describes her experiences with so much ease and sincerity in such a lucid style that it cannot but arouse love and wonder for her. But the most striking feature of this book is her strong will and iron determination to cross all the hurdles of a handicapped person in her own life. And therefore, it has the universal appeal to all the readers throughout the world. Everybody should go through the book whenever he gets a chance.

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Essay on My Favourite Book for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on My Favourite Book

Essay on My Favourite Book: Books are friends who never leave your side. I find this saying to be very true as books have always been there for me. I enjoy reading books . They have the power to help us travel through worlds without moving from our places. In addition, books also enhance our imagination. Growing up, my parents and teachers always encouraged me to read. They taught me the importance of reading. Subsequently, I have read several books. However, one boom that will always be my favourite is Harry Potter. It is one of the most intriguing reads of my life. I have read all the books of this series, yet I read them again as I never get bored of it.

Harry Potter Series

Harry Potter was a series of books authored by one of the most eminent writers of our generation, J.K. Rowling. These books showcase the wizarding world and its workings. J.K. Rowling has been so successful at weaving a picture of this world, that it feels real. Although the series contains seven books, I have a particular favourite. My favourite book from the series is The Goblet of fire.

When I started reading the book, it caught my attention instantly. Even though I had read all the previous parts, none of the books caught my attention as this one did. It gave a larger perspective into the wizarding world. One of the things which excite me the most about this book is the introduction of the other wizard schools. The concept of the Tri-wizard tournament is one of the most brilliant pieces I have come across in the Harry Potter series.

In addition, this book also contains some of my favourite characters. The moment I read about Victor Krum’s entry, I was star struck. The aura and personality of that character described by Rowling are simply brilliant. Further, it made me become a greater fan of the series.

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What Harry Potter Series Taught Me?

Even though the books are about the world of wizards and magic, the Harry Potter series contains a lot of lessons for young people to learn. Firstly, it teaches us the importance of friendship. I have read many books but never come across a friendship like that of Harry, Hermoine, and Ron. These three musketeers stuck together throughout the books and never gave up. It taught me the value of a good friend.

Further, the series of Harry Potter taught me that no one is perfect. Everyone has good and evil inside them. We are the ones who choose what we wish to be. This helped me in making better choices and becoming a better human being. We see how the most flawed characters like Snape had goodness inside them. Similarly, how the nicest ones like Dumbledore had some bad traits. This changed my perspective towards people and made me more considerate.

Finally, these books gave me hope. They taught me the meaning of hope and how there is light at the end of the tunnel. It gave me the strength to cling on to hope in the most desperate times just like Harry did all his life. These are some of the most essential things I learned from Harry Potter.

In conclusion, while there were many movies made in the books. Nothing beats the essence and originality of the books. The details and inclusiveness of books cannot be replaced by any form of media. Therefore, the Goblet of Fire remains to be my favourite book.

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Describe a Book You Have Read Recently

Posted by David S. Wills | Jan 6, 2018 | IELTS Tips , Speaking , YouTube | 0

Today we’re going to look at a question from IELTS speaking part two, also known as the “long answer” question. In this part of the exam, as you probably know, you are expected to speak for about two minutes on a given topic . The topic will be presented to you on a “cue card” and you will then have a minute to make notes before you speak. Today, the topic is books and we will explore how to describe a book you have read recently .

There are lots of different ways that this question could be phrased, and so, as always, you can’t just memorise an answer. In fact, in IELTS it’s always a bad idea to memorize answers. You have questions like “describe your favourite book” or “describe a book that you read in your childhood,” but today I’m going to give you a more general question.

In this lesson, we will learn several things:

How to read the cue card
Note-making skills
Some useful vocabulary
How to answer this cue card fully

The Cue Card: Describe a book you have read recently

As I said, there are many IELTS cue cards about books. You could be asked about your favorite book or a book you really love, but in this case we will just look at a book you have read recently:

Describe a book you have read recently. You should say: what kind of book it is who wrote the book what the story of the book is and explain if it is a good book or not.

Once you have read the cue card, you must think about it quickly. Analyse the topic and ask yourself what exactly you should talk about. In this case, you may ask:

Can I talk about any book? – no, only one you’ve read recently
Could it be a book that I dislike? – yes, that is possible
Must it be a book that I enjoyed? – no, the final part of the question makes it clear that you don’t have to have liked it
Should I talk about the plot? – yes, that is fulfilling the third bullet point

You should quickly choose a book, think about how to explain it, and then try to talk about the ideas on the cue card.

describe a book you have read recently [ielts speaking]

Making Notes

So the first thing you should do is make a few notes on the topic. Of course, as we’ve discussed before, you really shouldn’t write too much. Remember – you just have one minute! Don’t write down sentences or else you’ll only have enough to speak for ten or twenty seconds. Instead, write the ideas you want to discuss or the vocabulary you may need.

In this case, of course we first have to think about the book itself. What was its name, and who was the author? It doesn’t have to be an English book, but you do need to be able to give the English title and – if it was written by an English-speaking author, you also must be able to say their name. Here in China, many famous foreigners have Chinese names, or at least their names are adapted to make it easier for Chinese speakers to pronounce, and so they sound weird to an English speaker. For example, my students always talk about “Jobs” when they mean “Steve Jobs.” So make sure you know the name.

Then you need to think about the tasks outlined in the cue card and make notes on them so that you don’t forget any part of it. This is where you need to make useful notes.

So the first thing we need to talk about, according to the cue card, is the “kind of” book. Another way of saying that is “ genre .” This means, is it a mystery novel or a romance? Is it a horror novel or a coming-of-age story? There are so many kinds of novels. Of course, you don’t need to know them all, but being able to talk about the ones that you actually like is important. Go beyond that and consider being able to discuss the book further in terms of adjectives – is it thrilling? Hilarious? Shocking? Provocative? These are some good vocabulary items to note down during your one minute.

When it comes to genre, you can borrow many words from your movie vocabulary . Here is a video about describing movies. Most of those words can be re-used for describing books:

Next you should really think about the plot of the novel. You don’t need to say everything. Instead, summarize it. Think about the main action and key scenes. Talk briefly about the beginning and ending, or any important moments.

When talking about the plot of a film or book, you can use the present simple or past simple. This is because these events exist outside of time as they are immortalized in a text. They are, in a sense, always happening.

For example, you could equally say:

Romeo kissed Juliet

Romeo kisses Juliet.

A great way of learning how to do this effectively is to go on Wikipedia or IMDB and then find descriptions of movies. Obviously, you should not try to memorize these, but you can definitely borrow some language or even structure.

Structuring your Answer

The important things about IELTS speaking part 2 are that you actually answer all parts of the question, and that you do it in between 1 and 2 minutes. The order in which you give the details is not important. Therefore, you can talk about any of the cue card suggestions first or last. However, be sensible and think of a logical order in your head. Make sure these are in your notes so that you don’t forget anything.

Sample Answer – Describe a Book

Here’s my answer to the above question.

Recently, I read a novel called Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, who is the writer of some popular TV shows. It’s hard to give the genre because it’s a quite unusual book; however, it is both a drama and a mystery to some degree. The story is about a plane crash. This happens at the beginning of the book, and after that we get the back story of the people who were on the plane. We don’t know why the plane crashed although it seems like an accident. However, the mystery element comes into the book as the story develops because we are shown too many coincidences. The book also details the relationship between a man and a boy who survive the crash, and this gives the story its heart. I really enjoyed this book. Normally I prefer to read non-fiction books but in this case I was attracted to Before the Fall because I really liked the writer’s TV work and I was curious about how he would handle a novel. Ultimately, I was not disappointed. His ability to tell a good story made him an excellent novelist.

Here’s my recording of the sample answer. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel for more IELTS videos. I try to post about once every 1-2 weeks.

I answered the “who wrote it” and “what kind of book” parts very quickly at the beginning and spent more time on the plot and my reaction to the book. It’s important you take into consideration while planning that some parts of the question simply aren’t possible to talk about that much.

Note also the verb “detail” in that second paragraph. It’s a reporting verb used in slightly formal speech meaning roughly the same as “tells”.

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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Talk about a Book or Novel You Recently Read - IELTS Speaking Cue Card Model Answer

Talk about a book or novel you recently read..

Please tell me:

who wrote this

what it is about

and explain if you enjoyed reading it and why

Talk about a Book or Novel You Recently Read - IELTS Speaking Cue Card Model Answer

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Model Answer 1

Recently, I delved into the captivating world of "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern, a novel that left an indelible impression on me. Morgenstern's masterful storytelling weaves a magical narrative set in a Victorian-era circus that appears without warning and only operates at night. The heart of the story lies in the fierce competition between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who, unbeknownst to them, are pawns in a game controlled by their mentors. As the plot unfolds, their rivalry transforms into a profound love that challenges the very rules of the game and the fate of the circus.

What makes "The Night Circus" particularly enthralling is its unique blend of romance, fantasy, and mystery. Morgenstern's vivid descriptions create an enchanting atmosphere that transports readers into a world where the boundaries between reality and illusion blur. The detailed portrayal of the circus, with tents filled with wonders like a sea made of clouds or a garden of ice, is nothing short of mesmerizing. This novel does more than just tell a story; it invites you to experience the magic firsthand.

My enjoyment of this book stems from Morgenstern's exceptional ability to craft a narrative that is as enchanting as it is thought-provoking. It's a testament to the power of imagination and the complexities of love and destiny. The characters are intricately developed, each adding depth and color to the story's rich tapestry. It's a novel that doesn't just entertain but also lingers in your mind, inviting reflection and admiration for its artistry.

Reading "The Night Circus" was an immersive experience that reminded me of the joy of getting lost in a good book. It's a novel that appeals to a wide audience, offering a magical escape that's as enchanting as the circus it describes. Its blend of fantasy and reality, combined with a compelling narrative, makes it a must-read for anyone who appreciates a well-crafted story.

Why this is a High Scoring Answer

The sample answer discussing "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern is an excellent high-scoring response for an IELTS Speaking Part 2 section, especially when addressing the topic "Talk about a book or novel you recently read." Here's why:

1. Comprehensive Coverage of the Topic: The response thoroughly addresses all aspects of the topic. It not only mentions the author and the plot but also delves into the themes and personal impressions, crucial for a task like "Talk about a book or novel you recently read." This comprehensive approach demonstrates the ability to discuss a subject in depth, a key criterion for a high IELTS score.

2. Fluency and Coherence: The answer flows smoothly from one point to the next, maintaining a clear and logical progression of ideas. This fluency and coherence are vital in showcasing the candidate's proficiency in English, an essential element in the IELTS Speaking section.

3. Lexical Resource: The use of descriptive and varied vocabulary, such as 'captivating', 'mesmerizing', and 'enchanting', aptly demonstrates a strong lexical resource. The response avoids repetition and uses synonyms effectively, which is indicative of a higher language proficiency level.

4. Grammatical Range and Accuracy: The response exhibits a wide range of sentence structures and grammatical forms, all used accurately. This range and accuracy further contribute to the likelihood of a higher band score.

Model Answer 2

I recently had the pleasure of reading "Educated" by Tara Westover, an extraordinary memoir that profoundly impacted me. Tara Westover's journey from a secluded, uneducated childhood in rural Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University is nothing short of remarkable. Her story is a powerful exploration of family, education, and the struggle to carve out a personal identity against overwhelming odds.

"Educated" is more than just a memoir; it's a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Westover's upbringing in a family that mistrusted mainstream education and medical care presents a stark contrast to the world she later embraces. The emotional depth with which she recounts her experiences makes her story universally relatable and deeply moving. Her struggles with family loyalty and the pursuit of knowledge raise profound questions about the nature of education and the paths we choose in life.

What I found particularly compelling about this book was Westover's raw and honest narrative. She writes with a clarity and intensity that draws you into her world, making her triumphs feel personal and her setbacks deeply affecting. The book is not just about academic learning; it delves into the education of the self and the courage it takes to question and change deeply ingrained beliefs.

Reading "Educated" was an eye-opening experience that challenged my perspectives on education and personal growth. It's a book that resonates with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world or fought to overcome personal barriers. Westover's story is a powerful reminder of the transformative power of education and the human capacity for change.

The response on "Educated" by Tara Westover is a prime example of a high-scoring answer for the IELTS Speaking task, particularly for the topic "Talk about a book or novel you recently read." Let's delve into why this is the case, focusing on the IELTS Speaking criteria:

1. Coverage of the Topic: The answer comprehensively covers the suggested topic. It doesn't just state the book's title and author; it goes into depth about the content, themes, and personal reflections. This approach demonstrates a thorough understanding and engagement with the topic, a key aspect of the IELTS Speaking section.

2. Fluency and Coherence: The response is well-structured, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It flows logically from discussing the book's plot to its deeper themes and personal impact. Such coherence in presenting ideas is crucial for achieving a high score in the speaking section.

3. Lexical Resource: The use of a rich and varied vocabulary is evident. Terms like 'profoundly impacted', 'extraordinary memoir', and 'transformative power' show a high level of language proficiency. This broad lexical range helps in conveying ideas more effectively and is essential for a higher band score.

4. Grammatical Range and Accuracy: The answer demonstrates a strong grasp of grammar, with complex sentence structures used correctly. This range and accuracy in grammar usage are indicative of a higher level of language proficiency.

For further insights and strategies on excelling in the IELTS Speaking section, you might find our exclusive IELTS books (pdf download) invaluable. They provide you with additional examples and tips to enhance your preparation and performance.

Model Answer 3

One book that has recently captivated me is "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens. This novel, set in the marshlands of North Carolina, tells the story of Kya Clark, a girl who grows up isolated in the marshes after being abandoned by her family. As she matures, Kya becomes intertwined in a murder mystery that shakes the local community. Owens masterfully blends a coming-of-age story with a suspenseful mystery, creating a narrative that is both heart-wrenching and compelling.

The allure of "Where the Crawdads Sing" lies in its exquisite depiction of the natural world, intertwined with the poignant human drama. Owens' background as a wildlife scientist enriches the novel with vivid descriptions of the marshland, bringing the setting to life with a sensory richness that is rare in modern literature. Kya's deep connection with her environment is portrayed with such authenticity that it transforms the marsh into a character of its own.

What resonated with me most was the novel's exploration of loneliness, resilience, and the human need for connection. Kya's journey, from a forsaken child to a strong, independent woman, is inspiring. The narrative also delves into themes of prejudice and judgment, revealing the often harsh realities of social exclusion.

"Where the Crawdads Sing" is more than just a story; it's an immersive experience that transports you into its world, making you feel the breeze of the marsh and the sting of isolation. Its blend of lyrical prose and gripping plot makes it a unique literary masterpiece, appealing to a wide spectrum of readers.

Reading this book was a journey through a spectrum of emotions, from deep empathy to heart-pounding anticipation. It's a novel that not only entertains but also invites reflection on the complexities of human nature and the beauty of the natural world.

The response about "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens is an exemplary high-scoring answer for the IELTS Speaking task, specifically for the topic "Talk about a book or novel you recently read." Here's an analysis of why this response stands out:

1. Full Engagement with the Topic: The answer comprehensively addresses the topic, offering insights into the book's plot, themes, and the respondent's personal reaction. This depth of analysis demonstrates an ability to engage fully with the subject matter, which is essential for achieving a high score in the speaking section.

2. Fluency and Coherence: The response is smoothly structured and coherent. It begins with a brief introduction to the book, delves into its thematic elements, and concludes with the respondent's personal reflection. This clear progression of ideas is a hallmark of fluent and effective communication.

3. Rich Lexical Resource: The usage of descriptive language and varied vocabulary, such as 'heart-wrenching', 'sensory richness', and 'lyrical prose', showcases a broad lexical resource. The ability to use diverse and contextually appropriate vocabulary is key to scoring well in the IELTS speaking section.

4. Grammatical Range and Accuracy: The response exhibits a variety of complex sentence structures and grammatical forms, all used accurately. This range and precision are indicative of a high level of proficiency in English.

As you delve deeper into preparing for your IELTS exam, our exclusive IELTS books (pdf download) offer comprehensive strategies and insights to enhance your speaking skills. They're tailored to provide you with the knowledge and confidence needed to excel in your IELTS journey.

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Speaking Cue Card Answers

Describe a book you have recently read – IELTS Cue Card Sample Answers

Updated On Aug 14, 2024

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Sample answer 1, sample answer 2.

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This article contains the Describe a book you have recently read Cue Card Sample Answers.

During Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test, you will have exactly one minute to prepare and speak on a specific topic. This is the IELTS cue card task. You can learn how to communicate clearly and successfully by reviewing sample answers.

This IELTS cue card gives you an opportunity to share one of your opinions about a book you have recently read.

Practise IELTS Speaking Part 2 by referencing the Cue Card Sample Answers below.

Before you start, take a look at the introduction to Speaking Part 2 below!

Learn How to Prepare a Cue Card now!

Describe a book you read

You should say:

Who wrote this book?
What it is about?
When you read it?
And explain why you liked it.

Being a bibliophile, I try my best to complete at least one book a week. Earlier, I used to read 4-5 books a month. However, gradually, the numbers declined as I got held up in other important tasks. So, with the new year, I have taken a resolution to finish a minimum of 2 books a month. Having said that, I spent the last week reading A Bend in the Road by Nicholas Sparks.

The main protagonists of this book are Miles Ryan and Sarah Andrews. The former loses his wife to a hit-and-run accident. After going through a tough time in his life and spending two years trying to find the person behind this accident, Miles begins dating his son – Jonah’s – teacher, Sarah Andrews.

With time, their relationship turns stronger, and they fall deeply in love with each other. However, Miles comes across new evidence pertaining to the death of his wife. And, this person is somehow related to Sarah.

This is a romantic novel that showcases the attributes of love, sacrifice, and letting go. I like the way the author described diverse emotions keenly and precisely. Also, I liked the way of writing that the author put forth in this book.

On a Saturday evening, I was lying down with this book called “ Tell me your dreams” by Sidney Sheldon. Thanks to the maid, who served hot tea.

The book had an irresistible start. Initially, it describes three women, their love life and the mysterious ways in which their lovers are killed. After some time, the plot becomes gripping. It is revealed that they are three personalities of the same woman, Ashley, who suffered from multiple personality disorder and had murdered the men mercilessly.

Later, it is revealed that Ashley had a traumatic childhood which caused her to create these identities. Ashley is represented by a lawyer friend of her father. The court finally accepts that it was Ashley’s condition that made her kill and orders psychiatric treatment. She gets treated in the hospital and regains sanity.

The book has revealed an episode in the life of a psychiatrically affected person. It gave me an insight into the lives of women experiencing wounding disturbances in their childhood. Infact, when I come across news about murders, especially when the charges are against a lady, I suspect whether the woman is really guilty. The book cast such an effect on me.

Grant: agree to give or allow (something requested) to. Eg: He was granted permission to take leave
Curious: interested in learning about people or things around you Eg: Rose was curious about her results.
Impulsively: without forethought; on impulse; suddenly. Eg: Rose impulsively decided to buy the diamond necklace.
Found out: discover something or come to know about something. Eg: The treasure box hidden in the backyard was found out.
Novelty: the quality of being new, original, or unusual Eg: The tourists are still a novelty on this remote island
In hindsight: the ability to understand an event or situation only after it has happened Eg: In hindsight, I should have taken the job offer.

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Topic 1: Describe a book you have recently read

What kind of book it is
What it is about
What sort of people would enjoy it
And explain why you liked it.

Sample Answer:

I consider myself as a bookworm so when it comes to describing a book I read, I am really confused since I don’t know which one to choose, but I will tell you about the book that I have just ﬁnished most recently – Angels and Demons – a bestselling mystery-thriller novel written by Dan Brown. The whole story revolves around the protagonist named Robert Langdon who is on a quest to rescue the Pope and discover the underlying mysteries of the Catholic church. Though the book involves a lot of religious issues, it can cater to all kinds of readers as there aren’t many technical terms. From my point of view, it is a true masterpiece, enchanting and captivating, ﬁlled with conspiracies and plot twists that really send shivers down my spine. I was so fascinated by the book that I had to ﬁnd the ﬁlm adaptation online to watch afterwards, and it did not let me down at all. The movie was so action-packed that it kept me on the edge of my seat.

What I especially like about the book is that it is very thought-provoking and it kept me thinking for a very long time after I had ﬁnished reading. I appreciate the moral lessons of the book. The story, though may sound distant to our lives, conveys meanings that are relatable to readers, and I am grateful that I learnt something from the book.

All in all, it is an outstanding book that I would deﬁnitely recommend to my friends.

Topic 2: Describe a book that you would like to read again

What the book was about
Why you read it the first place
What you learned from this book
And explain why you would like to read it again.

Sample Answer

Okay so I would like to tell you about the book called Harry Potter, which is a fantasy novel, written by the British author J. K. Rowling. It’s one that I can reread time and time again.

The book describes the life of a young wizard named Harry Potter and his two best friends, Ron and Hermione. Harry has to struggle to kill the Dark wizard Lord Voldemort, whose aim is to become immortal and destroy all those who stand in his way of ruling the world.

The reason why this book comes to mind is that it is a reminder of my childhood. It was a gift for my birthday from my parents to reward my high score in an exam at school. Up until now, I can still remember clearly how fascinated I was when I received it.

Thanks to this book, I realized that determination and effort play essential roles in achieving my goals. Since then, I have always worked hard to overcome all obstacles and challenges in my life.

Harry Potter will always be on my to-read list for a number of reasons. Firstly, I have always been a great admirer of science fiction books so I love the way that the author describes the whole magical world with the magic school, Hogwarts, and the flying brooms. Secondly, reading this book not only helps me to relax after a long day of work or study but also cheers me up whenever I am feeling blue.

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Another Topics:

Describe a book that enjoyed reading because you had to think a lot.

IELTS Speaking Part 2: describe a book answer

Describe a book you liked to read in your childhood

Describe an exciting book you have read

Describe the book you read that you found useful

[…] Sample Answer […]

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How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

Who is telling the story?
How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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How to Write an Essay On Books

To write a good essay about books on a free topic, you just need to understand what you want to get. And, based on this information, make a plan.

To begin with, you need to understand the difference between these concepts:

Are you writing a personal opinion about a book? You can tell whether you liked it or not, what in it caught you or repulsed you.
Or is it an overview of the story lines? A full description of what is written in the book, your thoughts on the main points of the book.
Or is it a description of the book? Then highlight points of interest. This kind of text usually encourages you to read it.

If you are writing an essay on books for school, you probably need to write a book review.

Preparing for the essay

The experts at StudyCrumb Educational Agency assure you that by following a simple procedure, you will be able to write the essay you need quickly and easily.

Choose the book you want to write an essay about. It is better if it is one that you have memorized well. Some teachers recommend writing an essay on your favorite books.
Make a short outline that includes an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion.
Recall what your book is about. Write out a couple of main thoughts that are memorable and seem close to your heart.
Write a review of the book, the kind you’d like to write for your friend. In simple, uncomplicated words.

Essay Writing

Having prepared your drafts and outline for your essay, you’ve already done a tremendous job, and it’s just a matter of doing a little bit more. Be sure to remember that the essay about the book you read is your thoughts, feelings, and emotions about the work itself.

In the water part, write about the plot of the book, about the essence, but don’t reveal the intrigue completely, so that your classmates can read the book too. You can quote a few curious places, but don’t forget to justify why you chose them.

In the main part you should write your personal opinion of what you have read. If the teacher did not mention that the book must necessarily be a favorite, you can also write about the book, which, on the contrary, left a negative residue in your soul.

It is better to make the ending short and concise. Write what you like to read, why you like to read, and recommend the chosen work to read all. Check out http://cheapessaysonline.com/ for quality essay examples for your own inspiration.

Examples of essay on books

An essay about a book leaves the imagination free, especially when you’re a big fan of the book world. But sometimes reading is much easier than writing. So here are a few examples of essays.

Introduction:

“I love to read. Reading helps you immerse yourself in that completely different world. Makes you forget that you are a mere student. You can become a great traveler, fly around the globe, or you can find yourself in a school of magic and learn complex magical sciences. My choice was the Harry Potter book, because that’s the world where I spent my childhood.

“My favorite book is Roald Dahl ‘s Matilda. I think this work is suitable for children as well as adults. Matilda is a little girl with strange parents and a very mean principal. And then, one day, a good teacher shows up at school who treats all the students, including Matilda, with awe. When I was little, I was sure it was just a fairy tale. But now, after rereading this book to refresh my memory, I realize that the book has adult overtones. Matilda is the personification of all the children of the world who face the hostility of adults who should not have been parents or educators.”

The final part:

“I would like to finish my essay about the book “Three Comrades” with the advice: read, look for a moral in any work, and you can become a good person.

These are just examples of how you can write essay on books. Choose your favorite book and write whatever you want to say.

Emotional Journaling for Fiction Writers: Tapping into Character Feelings

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Book Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you write a book review, a report or essay that offers a critical perspective on a text. It offers a process and suggests some strategies for writing book reviews.

What is a review?

A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews .

Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Typically, reviews are brief. In newspapers and academic journals, they rarely exceed 1000 words, although you may encounter lengthier assignments and extended commentaries. In either case, reviews need to be succinct. While they vary in tone, subject, and style, they share some common features:

First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose.
Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and how it enhanced your understanding of the issues at hand.
Finally, in addition to analyzing the work, a review often suggests whether or not the audience would appreciate it.

Becoming an expert reviewer: three short examples

Reviewing can be a daunting task. Someone has asked for your opinion about something that you may feel unqualified to evaluate. Who are you to criticize Toni Morrison’s new book if you’ve never written a novel yourself, much less won a Nobel Prize? The point is that someone—a professor, a journal editor, peers in a study group—wants to know what you think about a particular work. You may not be (or feel like) an expert, but you need to pretend to be one for your particular audience. Nobody expects you to be the intellectual equal of the work’s creator, but your careful observations can provide you with the raw material to make reasoned judgments. Tactfully voicing agreement and disagreement, praise and criticism, is a valuable, challenging skill, and like many forms of writing, reviews require you to provide concrete evidence for your assertions.

Consider the following brief book review written for a history course on medieval Europe by a student who is fascinated with beer:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, investigates how women used to brew and sell the majority of ale drunk in England. Historically, ale and beer (not milk, wine, or water) were important elements of the English diet. Ale brewing was low-skill and low status labor that was complimentary to women’s domestic responsibilities. In the early fifteenth century, brewers began to make ale with hops, and they called this new drink “beer.” This technique allowed brewers to produce their beverages at a lower cost and to sell it more easily, although women generally stopped brewing once the business became more profitable.

The student describes the subject of the book and provides an accurate summary of its contents. But the reader does not learn some key information expected from a review: the author’s argument, the student’s appraisal of the book and its argument, and whether or not the student would recommend the book. As a critical assessment, a book review should focus on opinions, not facts and details. Summary should be kept to a minimum, and specific details should serve to illustrate arguments.

Now consider a review of the same book written by a slightly more opinionated student:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 was a colossal disappointment. I wanted to know about the rituals surrounding drinking in medieval England: the songs, the games, the parties. Bennett provided none of that information. I liked how the book showed ale and beer brewing as an economic activity, but the reader gets lost in the details of prices and wages. I was more interested in the private lives of the women brewsters. The book was divided into eight long chapters, and I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to read it.

There’s no shortage of judgments in this review! But the student does not display a working knowledge of the book’s argument. The reader has a sense of what the student expected of the book, but no sense of what the author herself set out to prove. Although the student gives several reasons for the negative review, those examples do not clearly relate to each other as part of an overall evaluation—in other words, in support of a specific thesis. This review is indeed an assessment, but not a critical one.

Here is one final review of the same book:

One of feminism’s paradoxes—one that challenges many of its optimistic histories—is how patriarchy remains persistent over time. While Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 recognizes medieval women as historical actors through their ale brewing, it also shows that female agency had its limits with the advent of beer. I had assumed that those limits were religious and political, but Bennett shows how a “patriarchal equilibrium” shut women out of economic life as well. Her analysis of women’s wages in ale and beer production proves that a change in women’s work does not equate to a change in working women’s status. Contemporary feminists and historians alike should read Bennett’s book and think twice when they crack open their next brewsky.

This student’s review avoids the problems of the previous two examples. It combines balanced opinion and concrete example, a critical assessment based on an explicitly stated rationale, and a recommendation to a potential audience. The reader gets a sense of what the book’s author intended to demonstrate. Moreover, the student refers to an argument about feminist history in general that places the book in a specific genre and that reaches out to a general audience. The example of analyzing wages illustrates an argument, the analysis engages significant intellectual debates, and the reasons for the overall positive review are plainly visible. The review offers criteria, opinions, and support with which the reader can agree or disagree.

Developing an assessment: before you write

There is no definitive method to writing a review, although some critical thinking about the work at hand is necessary before you actually begin writing. Thus, writing a review is a two-step process: developing an argument about the work under consideration, and making that argument as you write an organized and well-supported draft. See our handout on argument .

What follows is a series of questions to focus your thinking as you dig into the work at hand. While the questions specifically consider book reviews, you can easily transpose them to an analysis of performances, exhibitions, and other review subjects. Don’t feel obligated to address each of the questions; some will be more relevant than others to the book in question.

What is the thesis—or main argument—of the book? If the author wanted you to get one idea from the book, what would it be? How does it compare or contrast to the world you know? What has the book accomplished?
What exactly is the subject or topic of the book? Does the author cover the subject adequately? Does the author cover all aspects of the subject in a balanced fashion? What is the approach to the subject (topical, analytical, chronological, descriptive)?
How does the author support their argument? What evidence do they use to prove their point? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does any of the author’s information (or conclusions) conflict with other books you’ve read, courses you’ve taken or just previous assumptions you had of the subject?
How does the author structure their argument? What are the parts that make up the whole? Does the argument make sense? Does it persuade you? Why or why not?
How has this book helped you understand the subject? Would you recommend the book to your reader?

Beyond the internal workings of the book, you may also consider some information about the author and the circumstances of the text’s production:

Who is the author? Nationality, political persuasion, training, intellectual interests, personal history, and historical context may provide crucial details about how a work takes shape. Does it matter, for example, that the biographer was the subject’s best friend? What difference would it make if the author participated in the events they write about?
What is the book’s genre? Out of what field does it emerge? Does it conform to or depart from the conventions of its genre? These questions can provide a historical or literary standard on which to base your evaluations. If you are reviewing the first book ever written on the subject, it will be important for your readers to know. Keep in mind, though, that naming “firsts”—alongside naming “bests” and “onlys”—can be a risky business unless you’re absolutely certain.

Writing the review

Once you have made your observations and assessments of the work under review, carefully survey your notes and attempt to unify your impressions into a statement that will describe the purpose or thesis of your review. Check out our handout on thesis statements . Then, outline the arguments that support your thesis.

Your arguments should develop the thesis in a logical manner. That logic, unlike more standard academic writing, may initially emphasize the author’s argument while you develop your own in the course of the review. The relative emphasis depends on the nature of the review: if readers may be more interested in the work itself, you may want to make the work and the author more prominent; if you want the review to be about your perspective and opinions, then you may structure the review to privilege your observations over (but never separate from) those of the work under review. What follows is just one of many ways to organize a review.

Introduction

Since most reviews are brief, many writers begin with a catchy quip or anecdote that succinctly delivers their argument. But you can introduce your review differently depending on the argument and audience. The Writing Center’s handout on introductions can help you find an approach that works. In general, you should include:

The name of the author and the book title and the main theme.
Relevant details about who the author is and where they stand in the genre or field of inquiry. You could also link the title to the subject to show how the title explains the subject matter.
The context of the book and/or your review. Placing your review in a framework that makes sense to your audience alerts readers to your “take” on the book. Perhaps you want to situate a book about the Cuban revolution in the context of Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Another reviewer might want to consider the book in the framework of Latin American social movements. Your choice of context informs your argument.
The thesis of the book. If you are reviewing fiction, this may be difficult since novels, plays, and short stories rarely have explicit arguments. But identifying the book’s particular novelty, angle, or originality allows you to show what specific contribution the piece is trying to make.
Your thesis about the book.

Summary of content

This should be brief, as analysis takes priority. In the course of making your assessment, you’ll hopefully be backing up your assertions with concrete evidence from the book, so some summary will be dispersed throughout other parts of the review.

The necessary amount of summary also depends on your audience. Graduate students, beware! If you are writing book reviews for colleagues—to prepare for comprehensive exams, for example—you may want to devote more attention to summarizing the book’s contents. If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more subtle points and to emphasize your own argument. See our handout on summary for more tips.

Analysis and evaluation of the book

Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument. This arrangement can be challenging when your purpose is to consider the book as a whole, but it can help you differentiate elements of your criticism and pair assertions with evidence more clearly. You do not necessarily need to work chronologically through the book as you discuss it. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book. If you find it useful to include comparisons to other books, keep them brief so that the book under review remains in the spotlight. Avoid excessive quotation and give a specific page reference in parentheses when you do quote. Remember that you can state many of the author’s points in your own words.

Sum up or restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the book. You should not introduce new evidence for your argument in the conclusion. You can, however, introduce new ideas that go beyond the book if they extend the logic of your own thesis. This paragraph needs to balance the book’s strengths and weaknesses in order to unify your evaluation. Did the body of your review have three negative paragraphs and one favorable one? What do they all add up to? The Writing Center’s handout on conclusions can help you make a final assessment.

Finally, a few general considerations:

Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish the author had written. You can and should point out shortcomings or failures, but don’t criticize the book for not being something it was never intended to be.
With any luck, the author of the book worked hard to find the right words to express her ideas. You should attempt to do the same. Precise language allows you to control the tone of your review.
Never hesitate to challenge an assumption, approach, or argument. Be sure, however, to cite specific examples to back up your assertions carefully.
Try to present a balanced argument about the value of the book for its audience. You’re entitled—and sometimes obligated—to voice strong agreement or disagreement. But keep in mind that a bad book takes as long to write as a good one, and every author deserves fair treatment. Harsh judgments are difficult to prove and can give readers the sense that you were unfair in your assessment.
A great place to learn about book reviews is to look at examples. The New York Times Sunday Book Review and The New York Review of Books can show you how professional writers review books.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Drewry, John. 1974. Writing Book Reviews. Boston: Greenwood Press.

Hoge, James. 1987. Literary Reviewing. Charlottesville: University Virginia of Press.

Sova, Dawn, and Harry Teitelbaum. 2002. How to Write Book Reports , 4th ed. Lawrenceville, NY: Thomson/Arco.

Walford, A.J. 1986. Reviews and Reviewing: A Guide. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Essay Examples on Reading Books

What makes a good reading books essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay about reading books, choosing the right topic is essential. A good essay topic is one that is interesting, relevant, and allows for in-depth analysis and discussion. To brainstorm and choose a good essay topic, start by considering your own interests and passions. What books have you read recently that have made a lasting impression on you? What themes or ideas from those books could be explored further in an essay? Additionally, consider the potential impact of the topic on the reader. A good essay topic is one that will engage and captivate the reader, sparking their interest in the subject matter. Finally, a good essay topic is one that allows for a variety of perspectives and interpretations, encouraging critical thinking and analysis.

Best Reading Books Essay Topics

The role of symbolism in "To Kill a Mockingbird"
The impact of censorship in "Fahrenheit 451"
The portrayal of mental illness in "The Bell Jar"
The theme of identity in "Beloved"
The use of magical realism in "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
The representation of race and gender in "The Color Purple"
The significance of the green light in "The Great Gatsby"
The portrayal of war in "All Quiet on the Western Front"
The theme of power and corruption in "Animal Farm"
The use of allegory in "Lord of the Flies"
The impact of colonialism in "Things Fall Apart"
The role of family in "Pride and Prejudice"
The portrayal of love and loss in "The Fault in Our Stars"
The theme of survival in "Life of Pi"
The representation of heroism in "The Odyssey"
The impact of technology in "Brave New World"
The portrayal of social class in "The House of Mirth"
The role of nature in "Walden"
The theme of innocence in "The Catcher in the Rye"
The significance of memory in "The Remains of the Day"

Reading Books essay topics Prompts

Imagine you are a character from your favorite book. Write a letter to the author expressing your thoughts and feelings about the story and its impact on your life.
Choose a book that you believe should be included in the school curriculum. Write an essay arguing for its inclusion, providing evidence to support your argument.
Create a playlist of songs that you believe represents the themes and emotions of a particular book. Write an essay explaining your song choices and how they relate to the story.
Choose a classic novel and write an essay exploring how its themes and messages are still relevant in today's society.
Imagine you are a literary critic. Write a review of a book you recently read, discussing its strengths and weaknesses and whether you would recommend it to others.

The Benefits of Growing Up and Reading Books

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The Decline in Reading in Modern Society

The crazy types of readers, the importance of reading as a productive activity for young children, why should you read the book before you watch the movie, "tottochan - the little girl at the window" book review, review of raven’s peak by lincoln cole, reading, comprehension and listening skills, learning and development in children through specific reading techniques, a reflection on the improvement in my reading, writing, and learning, the purpose of fantasy in children’s literature, the theories of preferred reading & oppositional reading, racism, redemption, forgiveness and hope in minor miracle, a poem by marilyn nelson, the analysis of the book "winning balance" by shawn johnson, teacher belief toward audiobook, ray bradbury and the main themes addressed in his books, the analysis of the philip larkin’s poem "this be the verse", a personal account of struggling with reading books but enjoying writing, pedagogy of the oppressed: analysis, shift towards an increase in female readership, human computer interaction to strategize reading disability, relevant topics.

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JD Vance Just Decried Political Violence. But He Endorsed a Book Celebrating It.

The book champions the violent regimes of right-wing dictators like francisco franco, while defining people on the left as “unhuman.”.

Noah Lanard

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On Monday, JD Vance wrote a more than 1,200 word post on X in response to a second apparent assassination attempt targeting Donald. In it, Vance said the “threat of violence is disgraceful,” called on people to “reject political violence,” and said he admired President Joe Biden for “calling for peace and calm.”

Vance’s rejection of political violence would be more persuasive had he not recently endorsed a book that celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and coauthor Joshua Lisec, a professional ghostwriter, was published in July with a forward by Steve Bannon. As my colleague David Corn reported in July, Vance wrote a blurb used to promote the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans , Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Even by today’s standards, Unhumans is extreme , transparently authoritarian, and evocative of Nazi propaganda in its insistence on the complete dehumanization of political opponents. The thesis of the book is that the right is up against “unhumans” intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists, leftists, and so-called progressives. In summarizing their argument, they write:

This is a book about unhumans, and this is what they do: With power, unhumans undo civilization itself. They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.

Vance and Posobiec appear to be close. During a speech in March to the hard-right group American Moment, the Ohio senator began began by shouting out “good friends” in the audience like fellow Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters and “Jack P,” an apparent reference to Posobiec, who was in the audience that night. Vance’s blurb appeared a few months later.

But it is really in their account of 20th century politics that the full extent of their revisionism comes into view. A section dealing with the Spanish Civil war comes with the subhead: “Fransciso Franco, a Great Man of History.”

“Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator,” the authors claim, “the eventual [sic] victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo , or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.” This will come as news to the Spaniards whose ancestors’ remains are still being identified in mass graves that Franco was responsible for.

As I read their paeon to Franco, who took power as a result of a military coup, I remembered Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild’s book on Americans who fought against Franco, Spain in Our Hearts . In it, Hochschild describes how Franco’s troops boasted about having Moorish soldiers rape Spanish women who opposed them. Franco’s Nationalist troops, he writes, celebrated raping perceived enemies by scrawling on walls: “Your women will give birth to Fascists.” Hochschild continues:

Beyond the rapes, in town after town, women whose only crime was to be supporters of Popular Front parties had their heads shaved. In a practice borrowed from Italian Fascists, they were then forcefed castor oil (a powerful laxative) and paraded through the streets, sometimes naked or half naked, to be jeered as they soiled themselves.

Posobiec and Lisec take a different view of Franco. They suggest that the Spanish civil war is rarely described as what it is: “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross—that is, for the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.”

Elsewhere in the book, Posobiec and Lisec celebrate Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup that deposed Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. One of the defining atrocities of Pinochet’s dictatorship were the “ death flights ” in which political dissidents were killed and forcibly disappeared after being dropped from the air into the ocean or mountains. Posobiec and Lisec write that the “story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism.” They continue approvingly, “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Other subjects of the author’s adulation include Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Joseph McCarthy. In closing, they argue that “Great Men of Means,” which they effectively define as dictators, are one of the best ways to crush their subhuman opponents. Supporting such a strongman is depicted as all but the opportunity of a lifetime. “You’ll know them when you see them,” the authors explain, “as they attract all the literal and metaphorical firepower of the enemy.”

Vance may abhor some political violence. But his endorsement of Unhumans raises questions about how he feels about the kind directed at his political enemies.

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Favorite Book Essay: The Most Engaging Book You Have Ever Read

The world is moving faster more than ever. Science and technology are progressively growing with discoveries people never thought of are possible five years ago. While they try to catch up on the world’s pace in development, they tend to forget the important things and lose focus of what matters most in life. People are becoming more materialistic, appreciating huge bank accounts rather than quality time with their loved ones. But humans weren’t considered to be the smartest form of organisms just to live in a stagnant pattern of working, paying the bills, and sleeping.

Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life helps people find the reason to live and gives an answer to the question “Why on Earth am I here for?”

The popular book has sold over 32 million copies which makes it a blockbuster Christian book of all time. Publishers Weekly even declared it to be the “Bestselling non-fiction hardback book in history.”

The Purpose Driven Life is a self-help book journal which takes its readers to a 40-day spiritual expedition and devotion to finding their relevance. The book is divided into sections, which the reader takes on once a day for 40 days. Each chapter has a different interesting topic to look forward to. The style Warren used in writing is very appealing because readers will hang on to it on a daily basis until they finish the last page.

It’s not the only tango which is made perfect with a partner. This book could also be learned with someone close to heart – a spouse, a friend, or a churchmate. At the end of each section, there is a portion for reflection. Both readers can write their sentiments side by side on the space provided in the journal. Consequently, the tandem can talk and share their feelings with one another, and possibly impact their own insights in addition to Warren’s. This book makes the reader feel that he is not alone and there is always someone he can talk to – God and his loved ones. No wonder they keep a tight grip at the edge of the book cover.

The Purpose Driven Life has been helpful to people suffering from depression. Michael Phelps, the famous Olympic swimmer, disclosed that this book turned his life around and saved him from committing suicide. He realized his own identity beyond just being a swimmer. He found hope and overcame his personal problems by discovering God’s plan for his life. His story is just one of the many lives that were rescued and inspired by this book.

Warren used various verses on the Bible to back up his claims and advice. Through his book, people were brought to light. They learned the truth about why God made people. It fuels the soul by empowering self-importance.

The Purpose Driven Life answers more life questions than it originally intends to address. It’s educating, inspiring, and motivating. It is food for the mind, the heart, and the spirit. It’s a book you should always keep by your bedside.

Works Cited

Warren, Richard. The Purpose Driven Life: Zondervan, 2012. ChristianPost.com. “Michael Phelps Says Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life Saved Him From Suicide.” Fox News Sports , 10 Aug. 2016, www.foxnews.com/sports/2016/08/10/michael-phelps-says-rickwarrens-purpose-driven-life-saved-him-from-suicide.html.

Oh, you have that trivial favorite book essay as an assignment! Brace yourself, because a flood of cliché, boring comparisons and words like “best,” “awesome” and “life-changing” are coming your way. Are you already dozing off? No? The good news is there’s no need to – we know how to turn the most trivial kind of essay into something really life-changing. Oh, God, those cliches are contagious!

First of all, to get your creative juices flowing a little bit, check out the favorite book essay posted above. It was created by one of our professional writers and published here for your free access to help you deal with writer’s block and other unpleasant academic difficulties. Secondly, make sure you check other articles on our blog – they are packed with useful advice confirmed by time and generations of students, creative topic suggestions that will make you go “OMG, you can write about THAT?” and simply cool samples.

Writing is hard work. It’s also a skill that can be learned, so, if you are experiencing serious trouble along the way, try not to fall into the trap of despair. Though at first it seems like you can’t put words into a coherent sentence (or you think you can, but your professor doesn’t like it for some reason), it will get better, especially if you use advice and samples from our blog.

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The Best Book I’ve Ever Read

In my many years as a journalist, scholar and thinker, I have read nearly all the great works of literature, including Milton, Shakespeare and the first third of The Brothers Karamazov. But no book has ever spoken to me as profoundly or directly as Joel Stein’s Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity.

Haven’t we all, on some level, been a Jewish boy in 1970s New Jersey with only female friends, an Easy-Bake oven and a strong predilection for show tunes? Haven’t we all had a panic attack when learning we’re going to have a son, since that means we’re going to have to figure out how to throw footballs, watch other people throw footballs and decide whether to be happy or sad about the results of said football throwing? Haven’t we all then tried to rectify our lack of masculinity by becoming a Boy Scout, fighting fires with firefighters, driving a Lamborghini Superleggera, doing three days of Army boot camp, firing a tank and going one round with UFC champion Randy Couture? I know I have.

Although Man Made won’t be published until May 15, I have already reread it more than 30 times, and to the shock of my lovely wife Cassandra, who overheard me, I still laughed at all the jokes on the 30th read. The quality of the writing is so consistently great that to find my favorite section, all I need to do is turn to a random page and read it. Like this one: Isn’t the entire point of being seen in a Lamborghini to get two women for a threesome? But–and here is the car’s one major design flaw–there are only two seats. So I’d have to meet two women at a club, take one home, drive back to the club, and take the second one home. By then, the effect of the Lamborghini would have worn off on the first one, so I’d have to take her for a quick drive somewhere, thus de-Lamborghini-sexing the second one. The math just doesn’t work out.

The only parts I didn’t fully enjoy were those in which the author suffered horribly. Like when after just three hours of boot camp–which admittedly was in Kentucky in the summer and he’d slept only three hours and wasn’t told not to lock his knees–he fainted daintily into the arms of a soldier. Or when UFC president Dana White insisted that Stein get choked out so he’d know what it feels like, and Stein faked nodding off, which caused White to get his psycho jujitsu-training friend to choke him out yet again, causing Stein to not be able to swallow his own spit that night. I really felt for him there.

It is clear from the book that Stein deeply loves his son, his wife, his combative father, his self-reliant father-in-law, his editor, his agent and every one of the people he meets in the course of his quest. Even that jujitsu guy who choked him out. I’m sure all those people will enjoy all the jokes that celebrate and do not mock them and will thank Stein for writing about them. Possibly with gifts of 2009 grand cru Bordeaux.

I admit I feared this book would be just a longer version of Stein’s column in Time, which wouldn’t be a bad thing given the awesomeness of that artistic endeavor. But it is much more. It’s got occasional cursing. And bigger type. I also admit I was wary of reading yet another book that traffics in the differences between men and women. But Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is to Man Made what Fifty Shades of Grey is to having sex with Venus. Just to make that completely clear: Time magazine says reading Man Made is better than having sex with the Roman goddess Venus. Also, to be clear, TIME magazine is fine with that sentence appearing in any promotional materials for the book.

Are there books with deeper insights, better reporting, more important ideas and a better theme song? No, there are not. In Man Made, Stein does that amazing thing great writers do when they take all these ideas that were already in your head, put them on paper and then charge you $27 for that paper. Or put them on e-readers and charge you $13 to download. Either way, it counts equally toward the author’s sales figures.

The film rights to Man Made have already been sold to Fox, and I hope it gets turned into a movie with George Clooney playing the Stein role, since they remind me so much of each other.

Though this is only Stein’s first book, I would already put him on par with David Sedaris, Dave Barry, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln. I have recommended Man Made not just to all my friends and family but also to strangers on Twitter, over and over and over again. My one fear is that after this great achievement, Stein will succumb to the soul-depleting self-promotion of book marketing and lose his ability to be a ruthless critic of our shallow times. Which is why, in case this is his only great book, I suggest buying one for yourself and one for your dad for Father’s Day.

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100 Must-Read Essay Collections

100 awesome essay collections you won't want to miss!

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

Book cover of The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

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All Those Books You’ve Bought but Haven’t Read? There’s a Word for That

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By Kevin Mims

Oct. 8, 2018

I own far more books than I could possibly read over the course of my remaining life, yet every month I add a few dozen more to my shelves. For years I felt guilty about this situation, until I read an article by Jessica Stillman on the website of the magazine Inc. titled “ Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You’ll Ever Have Time to Read.” Stillman argued that a personal library too big to get through in a lifetime “isn’t a sign of failure or ignorance,” but rather “a badge of honor.” Her argument was a variation on a theme put forth by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 best seller “The Black Swan,” a book about the outsize impact on our lives of large, unpredictable events. In essence, Taleb claims that although people tend to place a higher value on the things they know than on the things they don’t know, it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world most dramatically.

A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind. A man who has quit expanding his personal library may have reached the point where he thinks he knows all he needs to and that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. He has no desire to keep growing intellectually. The man with an ever-expanding library understands the importance of remaining curious, open to new ideas and voices.

Taleb argues that a personal library “should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary .”

I don’t really like Taleb’s term “antilibrary.” A library is a collection of books, many of which remain unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how that differs from an antilibrary. A better term for what he’s talking about might be tsundoku , a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read. My personal library is about one-tenth books I have read and nine-tenths tsundoku . I probably own about 3,000 books. But many of those books are anthologies or compilations that contain multiple books within them. I own a lot of Library of America volumes, a series that publishes the complete novels of authors like Dashiell Hammett and Nathanael West as a single book. Thus, my 3,000-book library probably holds more than 6,000 works. Once I have read a book, I often give it away or trade it in at a used-book store. As a result, my tsundoku is ever expanding while the number of books in my house that I have read remains fairly constant at a few hundred.

In truth, however, the tsundoku fails to describe much of my library. I own a lot of story collections, poetry anthologies and books of essays, which I bought knowing I would probably not read every entry. People like Taleb, Stillman and whoever coined the word tsundoku seem to recognize only two categories of book: the read and the unread. But every book lover knows there is a third category that falls somewhere between the other two: the partially read book. Just about every title on a book lover’s reference shelves, for instance, falls into this category. No one reads the American Heritage Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus from cover to cover. One of my favorite books is John Sutherland’s “The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction.” It’s a fascinating, witty and very opinionated survey of Victorian England’s novels and novelists, from the famous (Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray) to the justifiably forgotten (Sutherland describes the novels of Tom Gallon as “sub-Dickensian fiction of sentiment and lowlife in London, typically written in an elliptical, rather graceless style”). I’ve owned the book for 20 years and derived great enjoyment from it, but I doubt I’ll ever manage to read every word of it or of dozens of other reference books on my shelves.

Nor do I typically read biographies all the way through. Biographers have a tendency to shoehorn every last tidbit of information they can into their books. I don’t really care about the marks that Ogden Nash received on his third-grade report card or how many trunks of clothing Edith Wharton had shipped across the Atlantic when she moved to France. There are probably hundreds of biographies in my personal library. I have read parts of most of them but I have read very few in their entirety. The same is true of collections of letters. Whenever I finish reading a work of fiction by, say, Willa Cather, I’ll be inspired to pull out the massive tome “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather” and try to get the measure of what the author was like when she was “off duty.”

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Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Our today’s session is going to be focused on writing short essays on the topic of ‘The Book I Like The Most.’ There will be three sets of short essays on the same topic covering different word limits.

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Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 100 Words

Out of all the books that I have read, the one I like the most is Ramayana. Ramayana is a Hindu epic that tells the story of Lord Rama. The story starts with Rama’s father, Dasharatha, who was the King of Ayodhya and his three wives. Later Lord Rama is born and the story follows him as he grows up, gets married, is exiled and has to fight various demons and evil creatures.

The main part of the story is where Lord Rama fights the Demon King, Ravana and defeats him. He then returns to his kingdom and rules over the people as a moral and just ruler. This sacred epic written in ancient times teaches us a lot about life.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 200 Words

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about the outside world and improve our intellect. I love to read books. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. I have read many fictional and non-fictional books, but the book I like the most is our former president, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s autobiography, ‘Wings of fire’. The book covers his life story before he became the president of India.

In the book, Dr Kalam talks about his childhood, his early life, his family and the struggles they had to go through to make ends meet. He talks about his journey from being a small village boy in Tamil Nadu to becoming a leading scientist in Indian space research, nuclear and missile development programs.

His story is indeed inspiring and proves that one can achieve all their dreams if one is sincere and are determined to work hard and persevere. The book also highlights the importance of family in the life of a person and how their support can help one realize even their seemingly impossible dreams.

I have read the book multiple times and it has always left me feeling motivated and filled with determination to chase my dreams. It is indeed an amazing book.

Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 400 Words

Books are often referred to as a man’s best friend. They are loyal companions capable of uplifting our moods and providing us with a safe space. Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and information and have helped us evolve in many ways.

Books have the power to fuel our imagination, provide us with knowledge about almost everything and improve our intellect. Reading books also boosts our memory and improves our reading, writing and speaking skills. That is why children are always encouraged to read from a young age.

I love to read books and I grew up reading a variety of books, some fiction and others non-fictional. Fairy tales were my favourite. Reading about the different types of fairies, fairy godmothers, kind princesses, evil queens, witches and wizards was magical in itself. I also liked to read mythological books and found the tales from Greek and Roman mythologies pretty interesting.

As I grew up, my interest shifted to non-fictional books like biographies and autobiographies of famous people as well as memoirs and scientific journals. However, throughout the years, there is one series of books that has remained my favourite and that is the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling.

When I was eight years old, I received the first book of the Harry Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone’, as a birthday present from my aunt. I was delighted. That book introduced me to a whole new world – a world full of magical beings. As I read the book, my mind conjured up images of what that world might look like and my imagination exploded.

The book made me feel a range of emotions. I cried reading about Harry’s suffering. I smiled when Hagrid saved Harry. I felt so happy when Harry, Ron and Hermione became friends and I sat there holding my breath as the end approached.

After I finished the first book, I couldn’t wait to buy the following ones. However, even to this day, the first book holds a special place in my heart. Harry Potter books introduced us to the wizarding world and its workings. They taught us about friendship, about having fun as well as working hard. They also taught us that no matter how strong the evil force is, the good always wins in the end.

I also have many other books that I like. Some of them are ‘Wings of fire’ and ‘Ignited minds’ by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, ‘Gitanjali’ by Rabindranath Tagore, “To kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte.

I have adopted a very simplistic approach to writing these essays for a better understanding of all kinds of students. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, post them in the comment section below. Join our Telegram channel to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us,

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think. –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.” –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum , Dazed & Confused , and Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) · Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016) · Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) · Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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What is manhwa & where to read it & what are the best series explained.

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20 Best Manhwa on Webtoon

10 biggest yu-gi-oh anime mysteries, one piece's new arc could be doing something never done before in shonen, but not in a good way.

Most anime fans are familiar with manga, which are Japanese comic books, but few are familiar with manhwa , manga's Korean counterpart. Manga has grown significantly in popularity in the past few years. While it has always been popular in Japan, it seems the United States and the Western world in general have found an unstoppable appreciation for this entertainment form, including anime.

Manga's success has been outstanding. The One Piece manga series by Eiichiro Oda is now the best-selling piece of literature written by a single person of all time, outselling the Batman comics and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter . However, what some anime fans don’t know is that many of their favorite manga series aren’t Japanese at all.

Manhwa is the general Korean term for Korean comics and has introduced stories such as Solo Leveling and The God of High School to a global audience. Manhwa is directly influenced by Japanese manga and is often confused with them because of their similar style and storytelling techniques . In addition to their immense popularity in Korea, Manhwa comics have branched outside the Eastern market into U.S.-based outlets such as Webtoon. Furthermore, many Manhwa have been adapted into movies , dramas, and television shows.

Webtoon has a little of something for everyone with well over a million titles to choose from. Here are 15 of the best manhwa on the platform.

What Are The Best Websites & Apps to Read Manwha On?

From webtoon to manta, manhwa fans have plenty of reading options to choose from.

Luckily for manga fans looking to get into manwha, the stories are available in similar places. One of the primary spots to find the most popular and newest manhwa series is Webtoon. The basic version of Webtoon is free to download. Once downloaded, Webtoon readers can use a Coins system to view available stories. Readers also have the option to unlock exclusive episodes for different amounts of time.

Furthermore, Coins also allow readers to gain early access to the newest comics by purchasing a Fast Pass. Webtoon also has free-browsing options, such as Daily Passes that refresh daily or Free Coins that are periodically given during promotions. Lastly, Webtoon exclusive original series are free to read, and ongoing series are updated weekly.

While Webtoon is undoubtedly the most popular comic library, according to GameRant, Manta is another great option for reading manhwa . This subscription-based platform allows readers access to all comics for a single, straightforward fee of $4.99 monthly. Manta is available to comic readers through a website and mobile app, with a highly-rated interface that immediately displays the highest-rated series, completed stories, and top hits in a specific genre.

However, aside from these recommended resources, a plethora of other libraries exist, such as Tapas, Tappytoon, Lezhin Comics, Toomics, INKR Comics, and Pocket Comics.

What Are Manhwa's Unique Traits?

Aria_from_The_Villainess_turns_the_Hourglass_smiling_resting_her_chin_on_her_palm_with_noah_and_raeliana_to_the_left_and_navier_and_heinrey_to_the_right

Manhwa, in the form that is known and experienced now, has grown in popularity in recent years. As such, the style and approach of manhwa creators can be defined as more modern and technology-influenced compared to the manga industry, which can be still quite traditional. This is why the majority of popular manhwa are webtoons, and this form of digital publication inevitably influences their look and style.

Many manhwa, including Solo Leveling , are digitally colored. Furthermore, they are often conceived to be read vertically, making the experience significantly different from that of a manga. Finally, manhwa creators seem to privilege topics and genres that are proven to be successful, such as fantasy or isekai. Another incredibly popular manhwa genre is the Villainess one , or Otome, where the protagonist is reincarnated inside a story-based romance videogame, usually in the role of the evil antagonist.

What Are the Best Starter Manhwa Series You Can Read Now?

There is no limit to the variety of manhwa stories available to new readers.

Episode 12 Solo leveling Jinwoo holding daggers

Perhaps the most well-known manhwa series in 2024 is Solo Leveling . Based on the manhwa webtoon series, Solo Leveling is an action-adventure fantasy anime originally created by Chugong. The story follows Sung Jinwoo, who is slain in the depths of a high-level dungeon. He is reborn, however, and this time, he has a plan. Utilizing a unique program that only he can see and interact with, Jinwoo begins leveling up remarkably fast, and he now intends to use his newfound strength to cure his mother's illness and rise up in the world.

Solo Leveling Episode 12 Jinwoo Sung facing the Giant Desert Centipedes

Aside from Solo Leveling, there are countless other series perfect for manga fans hoping to dive into the world of manhwa . Great starter series include Eleceed, Legend of the Northern Blade, Leveling Up with the Gods, Limit Breaker, Mercenary Enrollment, Omniscient Reader Viewpoint, and The Beginning After the End.

While manga has an infinite number of stories to explore, fans often find themselves wanting to explore the stories of other Asian cultures as well. Manhwa, comics from Korea, are the perfect transition into discovering what the world’s storytellers have to offer. From the similar art style to the recognizable storytelling tactics, manga fans won’t feel a massive change from manga to manhwa. However, through websites like Webtoon or Manta, manhwa gives readers the key to unlocking a whole new world of stories, waiting to be explored.

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500+ Words Essay on My Favourite Book. Essay on My Favourite Book: Books are friends who never leave your side. I find this saying to be very true as books have always been there for me. I enjoy reading books.They have the power to help us travel through worlds without moving from our places.
Describe a Book You Have Read Recently
The Cue Card: Describe a book you have read recently. As I said, there are many IELTS cue cards about books. You could be asked about your favorite book or a book you really love, but in this case we will just look at a book you have read recently: Describe a book you have read recently. You should say: what kind of book it is. who wrote the book.
Talk about a Book or Novel You Recently Read
The sample answer discussing "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern is an excellent high-scoring response for an IELTS Speaking Part 2 section, especially when addressing the topic "Talk about a book or novel you recently read." Here's why: 1. Comprehensive Coverage of the Topic: The response thoroughly addresses all aspects of the topic.
Describe a book you have recently read
Sample Answer 1. Sample Answer 2. Limited-Time Offer : Access a FREE 10-Day IELTS Study Plan! Download Study Plan. This article contains the Describe a book you have recently read Cue Card Sample Answers. During Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test, you will have exactly one minute to prepare and speak on a specific topic.
Describe a book
Secondly, reading this book not only helps me to relax after a long day of work or study but also cheers me up whenever I am feeling blue. Source: zim.vn. Another Topics: Describe a book that enjoyed reading because you had to think a lot. IELTS Speaking Part 2: describe a book answer. Describe a book you liked to read in your childhood ...
An Interesting Book I Read
"An Interesting Book I Read" could refer to a personal reflection or review of a captivating book that left a lasting impression on the reader. In such a narrative, the reader might delve into the various aspects that made the book compelling, including its engaging plot, thought-provoking themes, well-developed characters, or the author ...
How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay
Table of contents. Step 1: Reading the text and identifying literary devices. Step 2: Coming up with a thesis. Step 3: Writing a title and introduction. Step 4: Writing the body of the essay. Step 5: Writing a conclusion. Other interesting articles.
How to Write an Essay On Books
Some teachers recommend writing an essay on your favorite books. Make a short outline that includes an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion. Recall what your book is about. Write out a couple of main thoughts that are memorable and seem close to your heart. Write a review of the book, the kind you'd like to write for your friend.
Book Reviews
This handout will help you write a book review, a report or essay that offers a critical perspective on a text. It offers a process and suggests some strategies for writing book reviews. ... If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more ...
Essay Examples on Reading Books
Racism, Redemption, Forgiveness and Hope in Minor Miracle, a Poem by Marilyn Nelson. 2 pages / 890 words. "Minor Miracle" by Marilyn Nelson is a narrative poem about racism, redemption, forgiveness and hope. It tells a story about two friends who nearly got hit by a truck while they are riding bikes together.
Opinion
The second component, assassination by personal device, isn't new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely ...
JD Vance Just Decried Political Violence. But He Endorsed a Book
The thesis of the book is that the right is up against "unhumans" intent on destroying civilization. It defines unhumans broadly—saying that the label applies to communists, socialists ...
Favorite Book Essay: The Most Engaging Book You Have Ever Read
The Purpose Driven Life answers more life questions than it originally intends to address. It's educating, inspiring, and motivating. It is food for the mind, the heart, and the spirit. It's a book you should always keep by your bedside. Works Cited. Warren, Richard. The Purpose Driven Life: Zondervan, 2012.
The Best Book I've Ever Read
May 21, 2012 12:00 AM EDT. In my many years as a journalist, scholar and thinker, I have read nearly all the great works of literature, including Milton, Shakespeare and the first third of The ...
Opinion
Mr. DeWine, a Republican, is the governor of Ohio. I was born in Springfield, Ohio. My wife, Fran, and I have lived our entire lives less than 10 miles from this city. When we were dating in high ...
100 Must-Read Essay Collections
Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick. 5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate. 6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay. 7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. 8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan.
A Book I Have Read
It is helpful for gaining lots of knowledge and information but reading a good book is healthier for our brain and…. A Book I Have Read Books And Reading Critical Thinking Mental Health. 6. Essay On Joy Of Reading Books. Words • 805. Pages • 3. Paper Type: 750 Word Essay Examples.
All Those Books You've Bought but Haven't Read? There's a Word for That
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review ...
Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF
Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most in 100 Words. Out of all the books that I have read, the one I like the most is Ramayana. Ramayana is a Hindu epic that tells the story of Lord Rama. The story starts with Rama's father, Dasharatha, who was the King of Ayodhya and his three wives. Later Lord Rama is born and the story follows him as he ...
The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade ‹ Literary Hub
Hilton Als, White Girls (2013) In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als' breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls, which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book.
A book you have recently read paragraph writing in english
A book you have recently read paragraph writing in english || Hello Friends, In this video we will learn how to write an essay on a book I have recently read...
A book you have recently read- Paragraph/Essay Writing in ...
Paragraph Writing on a book you have recently read, write a paragraph or essay on your favourite book.Best essay writing in EnglishParagraph writing in Engli...
What Is Manhwa? & Where To Read It & What Are The Best Series Explained
Manhwa, in the form that is known and experienced now, has grown in popularity in recent years. As such, the style and approach of manhwa creators can be defined as more modern and technology-influenced compared to the manga industry, which can be still quite traditional. This is why the majority of popular manhwa are webtoons, and this form of digital publication inevitably influences their ...
Free Essay: Book I have read
A book I have read. I read a lot, so it was hard to choose my favourite book. I really liked Harry Potter, which has 7 parts. It was written by J.K Rowling and it is one of the greatest fantasy books in the 21st Century. The story is sets a magical place called Hogwarts, where witches and wizards learn. The story is about a young wizard called ...
How to write a good essay when you haven't read the book?
Take any main idea you want and develop 3 BPs proving your point by using the PDF file of the novel and ctrl + F key words from the main idea or thesis, then use whichever quote pops up as supporting evidence. You can usually fit any quote to any main idea. This is coming from a certified procrastinator, someone who hates reading and has done ...

6 Paragraphs on ‘A Book I Have Recently Read’

A Book I Have Recently Read

A Book I Have Recently Read

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Describe a Book You Have Read Recently

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