write an essay on an interesting book

Essay on An Interesting Book

Students are often asked to write an essay on An Interesting Book in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on An Interesting Book

Introduction.

An interesting book I recently read is “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s a captivating tale that takes the reader on an unforgettable journey.

The story revolves around a young prince who travels across planets, meeting various inhabitants. Each encounter teaches him a new life lesson.

The characters are well-drawn, especially the prince. His innocence and curiosity make him relatable and endearing.

“The Little Prince” is a fascinating book that blends fantasy and reality. It’s a must-read for every student due to its profound life lessons.

250 Words Essay on An Interesting Book

Books are the repositories of knowledge, wisdom, and creativity. Among the myriad of books, one that stands out for its profound impact is George Orwell’s ‘1984’. This dystopian novel, published in 1949, presents a chilling vision of a totalitarian future that continues to resonate in the 21st century.

Unique Plot

The plot of ‘1984’ is set in a world divided into three superstates, where the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in Oceania under the watchful eye of Big Brother. The novel’s uniqueness lies in its exploration of themes such as totalitarianism, surveillance, and manipulation of truth, which are still relevant today.

Implications for Modern Society

Orwell’s ‘1984’ provides a stark warning about the potential dangers of absolute power and the erosion of individual freedoms. The concept of ‘Newspeak’, a language designed to limit free thought, mirrors modern concerns about the manipulation of information and the rise of ‘fake news’.

Character Development

Winston, a low-ranking member of the ruling Party, evolves from a passive observer to a rebellious figure, symbolizing the human spirit’s resilience. His struggle against the oppressive regime is a testament to the enduring human desire for freedom and truth.

In conclusion, ‘1984’ is an interesting book not just for its unique plot and character development, but also for its relevance in today’s society. It encourages readers to question authority, value their freedoms, and remain vigilant against attempts to manipulate truth. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is more than just a book; it’s a timeless reminder of the importance of critical thinking in a world increasingly dominated by misinformation.

500 Words Essay on An Interesting Book

Introduction: the power of books.

Books have been instrumental in shaping societies and influencing individuals. They have the power to take us on adventures, teach us new concepts, and challenge our viewpoints. One such book that has had a profound impact on me is “1984” by George Orwell.

Overview of “1984”

Published in 1949, “1984” is a dystopian novel that explores a future where totalitarian government reigns supreme. The protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and public manipulation. The book is a critique of totalitarian regimes and a warning about the loss of individuality and freedom.

Thought-Provoking Themes

Orwell’s “1984” delves into several thought-provoking themes. The most prominent is the concept of “Big Brother,” a symbol of the omnipresent government surveillance. This theme resonates more than ever in our current digital age, where privacy is increasingly under threat. The book also explores how language can be used as a tool of control. The government in “1984” invents a new language, “Newspeak,” to limit free thought and keep the population under control. This theme is a stark reminder of the power of words and the dangers of manipulation and propaganda.

Impact on Readers

“1984” has a profound impact on its readers, forcing them to question their understanding of freedom, truth, and individuality. It encourages readers to be vigilant about their rights and to question authority. The book’s relevance has only grown over time, with modern readers drawing parallels between the novel’s dystopian world and contemporary issues such as mass surveillance, fake news, and the erosion of privacy.

Conclusion: The Enduring Relevance of “1984”

In conclusion, George Orwell’s “1984” is a fascinating book that continues to engage and provoke thought among readers. Its exploration of themes such as government surveillance, manipulation of language, and loss of individuality remains relevant today. The book serves as a stark reminder of the importance of vigilance and critical thinking in preserving our freedoms. As college students, we can learn much from “1984,” not just about the dangers of unchecked power, but also about the importance of standing up for our rights and questioning the world around us.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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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.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

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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Expository Essay

Expository Essay About A Book

Learn the Basics of Crafting an Expository Essay about a Book

What is an Expository Essay About a Book?

So what is an expository essay? An expository essay is a type of writing that examines and explains a topic in detail.

Writing an expository essay about a book can be a fun and educational way to explore the meaning of literature. It allows you to analyze the author’s writing style, themes, or various other aspects of a book.

In such an essay, you are expected to choose a particular aspect of a book and write an essay discussing that aspect in detail.

For example , you can write an expository essay about the depiction of authoritarianism in George Orwell's 1984. Similarly, you can choose to discuss any aspect of a book you’ve read.

Now that you know what an expository essay is, let's look at some examples.

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Expository Essay About a Book Examples

To understand expository essays better, let’s take a look at some examples:

Expository Essay About a Book Example

Expository Essay About a Novel

Book Expository Essay Example

Reading these sample essays will help you understand what an expository essay about a book should look like.

Looking for more sample expository essays? Read our expository essay examples blog.

Now that you've read some essays, it's time for you to write one yourself. Let’s move on to the steps for writing your essay about a book.

How To Write An Expository Essay About a Book?

Expository writing requires a few simple steps to ensure your paper is well-structured and engaging.

Here are the steps you should follow to write an effective essay about a book:

Step 1. Read and Analyze the Book Thoroughly

Whether you have been assigned a book by your instructor or have chosen one yourself, you should read it thoroughly.

Before you begin writing your essay, it’s important to do your research. That means reading carefully through the book, taking notes on key aspects of the text, and making observations.

When analyzing a book, you may look for the following aspects:

Prominent themes
Important characters or events in the story
Why the author chose to write the book
How the text relates to its historical context

In short: read, take notes, and make observations.

Here’s a very useful video about how to discuss a book in your writing:

Step 2. Choose a Topic

Once you’ve read and analyzed the book in detail, pick out an interesting aspect you can write about.

Your chosen topic will serve as your essay’s focus and help guide your writing. It could be anything from a character’s development to an in-depth look at the themes or symbols in the book.

In addition to writing about a book, there are many other expository essay topics for you to explore.

Step 3. Outline Your Essay

Before diving into your essay, it’s important to create an expository essay outline that will serve as your roadmap. An expository essay commonly consists of five paragraphs, often referred to as the "five-paragraph essay" structure.

Your outline should contain:

Start by writing down your main points and supporting ideas and then organizing them into logical sections. It helps your essay flow logically.

Step 4. Write the First Draft of Your Essay

At this point, you can begin writing your essay.

Use the outline you created to structure your points and support them with evidence from the book. Make sure to remain objective in your analysis, citing facts and examples from the text.

Step 5. Edit & Revise

Once you’ve written your first draft, review it and make any changes or corrections necessary.

Make sure to double-check for grammar and spelling mistakes as well as the accuracy of facts. You may also want to get a second opinion from a friend or teacher before submitting your essay.

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To wrap it up,

Writing an expository essay assignment about a book can be a great way to explore literature.

By following the steps outlined in this blog, you’ll be well on your way to crafting an effective and engaging essay.

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How to Write an Essay About My Favourite Book

When you are preparing to write, your first question should be ‘what is my favorite book?’ Picking your favorite book will give a very good chance of success. So, what is your favorite book? Think very carefully about this. The more knowledge you have going in, the better your work will be. The more you like the book, the more comfortable you will be when writing.

Research About Interesting Facts

Read author’s biography, how to get the best favorite book essay, what is the value of this book, check usual essay on favorite book examples, create writing plan, start writing, write from your heart, talk about things which you liked, list book advantages, write like you want to sell this book, write a small part every day, finalizing essay, check your essay, proofread it three times, ask a friend to proofread, short example of essay about your favorite book.

When you have decided what book to focus on, start doing research. The essay on an interesting book you read will have some interesting facts surrounding it. Find them out. You can use them to make your work better! Interesting facts will make your work stand out in a crowd. At this point, it doesn’t matter what the interesting facts are. Collect as many important facts as you can. You can decide whether or not they are important later on.

If there is an author biography, then you should read it. It will give you insights into the book you love. It may also help you to write your favorite book essay, by giving you more ideas!

The author’s biography will give some ideas about themes, inspirations, and more. You may not learn about the book specifically, but you will learn about the circumstances around it. This can give your writing some depth in its ideas

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Any good short essay on your favorite book will ask how valuable it is. You need to justify it, and why it was important enough to write about. When writing about a book’s value, you are writing about its topic. What is it teaching people? What merits the focus it has? You need to justify your choice according to these questions.

Remember that there is always value in books. You only need to show people what that book means to you.

When you are preparing to write, look at some essay samples. Model your essay on your favorite book on a previously written sample, and you stand a good chance of writing a good essay.

Samples are good for a few reasons:

They show you what is expected in an essay
They can show different writing styles
They can give you ideas
They can inspire you to try new ways of writing
They show how different people approach the essays

Your first step in writing should be to create a writing plan. The essay on the book you like the most will involve a lot of separate elements. A writing plan will help you remember everything.

First of all, write a plan that has simply the basics in it. Put in paragraph headings. Put in your quotes. Now, look at it. What else do you want in there? Do you want your thesis statement? Do you want notes about what to put in each paragraph? Put in what you think will be helpful.

Anybody reading an essay entitled ‘my favorite book’ will want to hear writing from the heart. Don‘t just write a generic essay. Make it clear what this book means to you, specifically. This is the way to make your essay stand out in a crowd. This is what gets you noticed.

A key to good writing is actually wanting to do it. Write from the heart, and you will find the act of writing much easier.

There are many ways you can go about writing an essay about books. But whatever their focus, try and spend at least some time talking about what you liked. You will attract people’s attention by talking about what you like. Spend at least one paragraph on your favorite book in talking about how much you like it. It will make your essay even better. Talk about what you like, and people will remember it after they finish reading.

When writing, try and list any advantages a book has. People might be reading your favorite book essay for class and wondering why it is your favorite. Let them know. List the advantages the book has over other books.

Every book has something in it to make it worthwhile. You just need to show other people what that is. This is what will make your essay stand. Your essay will tell people what it means to you, rather than be generic.

The key to writing your favorite book essay is to act like you are trying to sell the book. The point of an essay is to keep people reading to the very end. Try and think beyond this point. What do you want people to do when they finish reading an essay about your favorite book? Do you want them to move on with their lives, or do you want them to read the book?

Obviously, you want them to read the book.

Don’t attempt to tackle the entire essay at once. When writing about your favorite book essay in English, try and do it in bite-sized chunks instead. Try and tackle one paragraph a day. This will give you mental space and physical time to handle it all. A lot goes into writing these essays. Doing it a bit at a time will keep you from being overwhelmed. This will also mean you can focus totally on one single element. Themes one day, character the next, and so on.

When you have finished writing, it is time to check your essay. An essay about the book you like most needs to stand by itself. Imagine that the person reading it knows nothing about you or your abilities. If they see spelling and grammar problems, they will react negatively. Make sure you have included everything you need to! The worst thing you can do is hand in an unfinished essay. Check that everything you want to include is there.

Your favorite book essay should not have any spelling or grammar mistakes. Spelling and grammar are the fundamentals of any writing. If you slip upon them, then people have a negative reaction to it. Proofread your work more than once. You would be amazed at how much you can miss. For your last proof, try and step away from the work for a while. You can then come back to it with fresh eyes.

Ask a friend to proofread your favorite storybook essay. Quite often people find themselves too close to their work. They honestly can’t see mistakes or inaccuracies. To avoid leaving any mistakes, ask a friend to help you. They have fresh eyes, and so will be able to see mistakes much more easily. Getting a friend to proofread means that you will catch any mistakes you might simply have glossed over automatically. You can dramatically improve your work this way.

This is an essay on my favorite book. My favorite book is Hogfather , by Terry Pratchett. The overarching story follows an Assassin called Teatime as he tries to kill the Hogfather (the Discworld’s version of Santa), and the people who are trying to stop him.

The major theme of the book is the nature of belief. This is explicitly shown by Teatime stealing teeth, and implicitly by Susan when she helps Death defeats the Auditors. The nature of belief in this book is such that, with no one to believe in the smaller things, the bigger issues, such as Hope, would eventually disappear.

What I love best about this book is the way it shows both sides of a conflict. Even if it does skew in supporting one particular angel, it still shows both sides. I appreciate that the motivations of everyone involved are laid out.

This book is a wonderful read. It combines humor with sincerity to an amazing degree. Even when people are having difficult and dangerous conversations, there is always a feeling that everything will be alright. Pratchett has managed to bring all of his characters to life in the book. Even the characters created solely for this book feel real and lived-in. This makes the themes of the story all the more touching and sincere.

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How do you get the best essays? Simple. Go to Essay Zoo, and buy one of their sample essays on the same subject. You can use this work to inspire your own writing! This works particularly well if you are new to this particular style of writing. Having something to learn from, something to compare your own work to is a huge help. Make sure not to copy the sample absolutely. Put your own stamp on the work. Maybe try and reverse engineer the sample paper – try and break it down to see how it all fits together. Samples can be helpful.

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing an Essay on a Book

Topic and assignment prompt, essay structure, why is it important.

Outlining Essay Structure

Organizing your essay efficiently is important for making sure it’s clear, concise, and to the point. Before you start writing, it’s important to understand the basic structure of an essay. Most essays are composed of an introduction, body, and conclusion.

The introduction serves as an opening paragraph where you should introduce the topic and provide any necessary background information that readers may need in order to understand the essay. A good introduction will explain why a reader should care about your topic and capture the attention of the reader.

The body is the main section of the essay where you will provide evidence, quotes, and any other relevant information to prove your point. It is important to make sure that each body paragraph has only one main point, and all of the evidence presented in the paragraph supports that one point.

The conclusion is the last paragraph of the essay. It should wrap up all of the points you made in the body and leave the reader with a sense of closure. It should also create a takeaway, or something for the reader to remember about what they have just read.

To make sure your essay is organized and has a consistent tone throughout, it is important to outline what each section should include. Outlining your essay structure before beginning eliminates unnecessary stress and makes sure you don’t forget any important points.

Research Phase: The Importance of Researching the Book

Before you dive into writing your essay on a book, you’ll want to make sure that you have done your research. No matter how familiar you are with the subject, it’s important to conduct research to ensure that your essay is accurate and well-informed.

Research can help you form a stronger thesis statement, better support your arguments, and provide evidence for your claims. It can also help you to organize your thoughts, uncover new ideas and angles, gain a deeper understanding of the text, or even find quotes or references that you can use in your essay.

Research should always come first. It helps to lay a strong foundation for the rest of your essay and it can save you from making any embarrassing mistakes. Have a clear understanding of the book’s themes, characters, and plot before you begin. Read reviews and criticisms, and take down notes for later.

Start by reading the book itself. Take your time and pay attention to details. Make notes, highlight any important passages, and consider different interpretations. After you get an overall gist of the book, expand your research outward into scholarly reviews, biographies, and other texts that can provide an objective, informed perspective.

The more research you do, the stronger your essay will be. Be sure to include all of the sources you used in your bibliography section. Research can be a tedious process, but with enough effort and dedication, you’ll be able to craft a well-informed, thoughtful essay on any book.

Pre-Writing Phase: Planning Your Essay

The pre-writing phase is the most important part of writing an essay on a book. Taking the time to plan your essay and organize your thoughts will help structure your argument and make your writing smoother. The pre-writing phase should involve a few key steps.

Brainstorm – Before you start writing, spend some time thinking about the book and how it relates to any themes, characters, or symbolism. Jot down your ideas so that you have a better understanding of what you want to focus on.
Outline – Write down some notes and make an outline of what you will cover in each paragraph. This will help you stay organized while writing and keep everything on track.
Research – Research any facts or quotes you may need to include in your essay. This will help you back up your claims and make your paper stronger.

Taking the time to plan ahead will help ensure your essay on a book is written clearly and effectively. You’ll be able to shape your argument easily and make sure you don’t miss anything important.

Thesis Formation

The thesis statement is a critical part of any essay on a book. It should be clear, concise, and capture the main argument and point of view of the essay. To ensure that your essay’s thesis statement is well-crafted, it is essential to follow a step-by-step guide.

Step One: Brainstorming Ideas

Before writing a thesis statement, you should brainstorm some ideas related to the book’s content. Consider the key elements of the book and think about how they could be connected into an argument or observation. Write down any ideas that pop into your mind, and use them as a basis for forming your thesis statement.

Step Two: Developing the Argument

Once you have a few ideas in mind, it is time to start developing a coherent argument. Try to make a connection between the ideas to create an original argument. Then, think about why this argument is important and what makes it relevant to the text.

Step Three: Writing the Thesis Statement

Now that you have an argument in mind, you are ready to craft your thesis statement. It should be a single sentence that clearly and concisely expresses your main argument. Generally, it should follow the same structure as any other essay’s thesis statement, stating the primary point of view, the evidence supporting it, and any other relevant details.

Step Four: Proofreading

The final step of crafting a great thesis statement is to proofread and edit it. Make sure that the statement is clear, concise, and captures the argument accurately. Additionally, pay attention to grammar and spelling. A minor mistake can weaken the force of the statement significantly.

Creating an effective thesis statement can help get your essay off to a strong start. As long as you follow these steps, you will be able to form a well-developed argument that can help you write a great essay on a book.

Drafting an Organized Paragraph

Editing: benefits and how to approach it effectively.

When writing an essay on a book, editing is a crucial step in the process. It can often be overlooked or skipped, but it shouldn’t be! Editing offers many valuable benefits, and it’s important to understand how to approach it effectively.

One of the biggest benefits of editing is that it gives you the opportunity to look at your essay with fresh eyes. Once you’ve written the paper, it can be nearly impossible to look at it objectively. Editing allows you to look at it critically and make necessary changes.

Editing also helps you to catch grammar mistakes, spelling errors, and typos. A single error can easily ruin an entire essay, so it’s essential to go over the paper and make sure everything is perfect. This can only be done by editing the paper carefully.

Finally, editing can help you to make sure that the essay is coherent and well-written. After writing the paper , you might realize that the introduction and conclusion don’t match up, or that two paragraphs contradict each other. Editing will help you to identify such issues and make the necessary adjustments.

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of editing, let’s look at how to approach it effectively. The first step is to read the entire essay through once without making any changes. This should give you a good overview of the paper and allow you to spot any major issues. The next step is to go through the paper again and make notes as you go along.

You should pay particular attention to grammar, spelling, typos, and structure. Make a note of anything that stands out and needs to be changed. Don’t worry if you can’t fix it right away – just write it down and come back to it later. The goal is to get an overall picture of what needs to be done.

Finally, it’s time to make the actual changes. Take your time and read each sentence carefully before you make any changes. Don’t be afraid to delete or add content between paragraphs to ensure that the essay flows naturally.

In summary, editing is an essential step in the essay-writing process. It offers many benefits, including the ability to look at the essay objectively, catch grammar mistakes and typos, and ensure that the essay is coherent and well-written. When approaching the editing phase, it’s important to read the paper through once without making any changes, make notes as you go, and take your time when making the actual changes.

Formatting – Adhering to Academic Standards

Formatting your essay correctly is a critical step in the writing process. It shows that you have taken care to put together an essay that follows the academic standards.

Here are a few tips for formatting your essay according to academic standards:

Make sure the margins of your essay are set to one inch on all sides.
Your font should be size 12 Times New Roman or Arial.
Use double spacing between lines, and make sure there is no extra space before or after each paragraph.
When quoting direct text, indenting it five spaces will make it easier to read.
Include a header at the top of your document that includes the title of the essay, your name, and the page number.

Formatted correctly, your essay will present itself as concise, organized, and professional. This is a must when following academic standards.

If you want to ensure that your essay looks even better, check with your professor for specific formatting requirements for your assignment.

By taking the time to properly format your essay, you are showing that you understand the importance of adhering to academic standards. This will help you get the best grades possible!

Understanding the Assignment

Writing an essay on a book can be quite a challenge for many students. One of the most important skills for tackling this task is to understand the assignment. To begin, students should read carefully and take notes on the writing prompt. Pay close attention to all the instructions as they are key to crafting an effective essay. This includes being mindful of any keywords or phrases in the prompt that will require further research.

When interpreting the instructions, it is also important to consider any extra guidelines or expectations the professor may have provided. These can include formatting, length, and specific areas of emphasis such as themes or characters. Questions such as ‘Who is the protagonist?’ or ‘How do the themes interact?’ should be actively considered while writing the essay. This helps produce a focused piece of work that is tailored to meet the requirements.

In addition, consider questions such as ‘What do I need to include?’ or ‘What is the purpose of this essay?’. Answering these questions allows students to identify their main points and develop an argument around them. This is a crucial step for forming an essay that is logical and cohesive.

Finally, students should always use the essay assignment to test their understanding of the book. It is often beneficial to leave time at the end of the writing process to review knowledge and reflect on any unanswered questions. Doing so ensures that the essay is comprehensive and addresses all aspects of the prompt.

Understanding the assignment is a vital step when writing an essay on a book. By paying attention to the prompt and any additional guidelines, students can ensure that their assignment is focused, detailed, and suitable for the task.

Effective Use of Quotes

Make sure your quote is relevant to the main argument of your essay.

Choose a quote that is engaging and thought-provoking.

Include the right amount of detail – don’t use too much or too little.

Explain the quote in your own words and provide context.

Think critically about the quote and how it applies to your argument.

Integrate the quote into your essay so that it flows naturally.

Tools for Writing an Essay on a Book

When writing an essay on a book there are certain tools that can help make the process easier. Knowing some of these basic terms and tools can help you write a better essay and make it much more enjoyable.

Creating an outline is one of the most important steps in writing an essay. It provides structure to your essay, ensuring that each point is made in the correct order and that the essay flows logically. Outlining also helps you stay organized and remember what needs to be included in the essay.

Doing research is important when writing an essay about a book. Read through the text and make notes about any interesting or pertinent information you find. Also, look for additional sources that can provide further insight into the book or the topics it raises.

Grammar and Spelling Checkers

Grammar and spelling checkers can be extremely useful when writing your essay. They can help you identify mistakes or typos that you may have missed. Double-check your work before you submit it to make sure it is as accurate and error-free as possible.

Writing Resources

Finally, there are many great writing resources available online that can provide further advice and guidance on how to write an effective essay. Look through examples of essays written by other students and learn from their techniques and approaches.

Knowing some of these basic terms and tools can help you get off to a strong start when writing an essay on a book. Do your research, create an outline, and use grammar and spelling checkers to make sure your work is as perfect as possible. Finally, don’t forget to look for other writing resources that can provide insight and advice.

Writing an essay on a book can be a daunting task, especially when attempting it for the first time. This guide aims to make the process of writing an essay on a book simple and easy-to-follow. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can make the process of writing your essay much easier.

A good conclusion should summarize the main points of the article, explain how to approach writing the final version, and reiterate why the content was important. To conclude your essay, start by summarizing the arguments and ideas that you presented throughout your paper. Then, move on to discussing why you chose to write the essay and the importance of studying the book. Finally, provide a brief statement that sums up the main points of the essay.

When writing the final version of your essay, there are some key points to keep in mind. First, proofread your work for any typos or errors. Make sure to properly cite any quotes or references that you used in your essay. Finally, consider having a peer review your essay to get another perspective and catch any mistakes that you might have missed.

Writing an essay on a book can be a rewarding experience when done correctly. The most important part of the process is to fully understand the material and the prompt. By following the steps outlined in this article and taking the time to research and plan, you can write an effective essay on a book.

Nick Radlinsky

Nick Radlinsky is a devoted educator, marketing specialist, and management expert with more than 15 years of experience in the education sector. After obtaining his business degree in 2016, Nick embarked on a quest to achieve his PhD, driven by his commitment to enhancing education for students worldwide. His vast experience, starting in 2008, has established him as a reputable authority in the field.

Nick's article, featured in Routledge's " Entrepreneurship in Central and Eastern Europe: Development through Internationalization ," highlights his sharp insights and unwavering dedication to advancing the educational landscape. Inspired by his personal motto, "Make education better," Nick's mission is to streamline students' lives and foster efficient learning. His inventive ideas and leadership have contributed to the transformation of numerous educational experiences, distinguishing him as a true innovator in his field.

How Long Is IB IA? Average IA Word Count

From my experience as IB tutor, a frequent question among students is, “How Long Is IB IA?” This question is crucial as the IA represents a significant component of the IB diploma, reflecting a student’s ability to apply classroom knowledge in a real-world context.

IB Extended Essay Rubric. Grading Criteria

Understanding the IB extended essay rubric is essential for success. The rubric provides a framework that grades students on several key criteria including the sharpness of their research question, the rigor of their methodology, the breadth and depth of their knowledge, the fluidity and clarity of their argumentation, and their personal engagement with the research topic.

IB TOK Essay Rubric. Grading Criteria

This article provides essential insights and strategies for understanding the assessment process and helping you write essays that meet and exceed the rigorous standards of the IB curriculum. Whether you’re striving for clarity of argument, effective integration of knowledge, or personal engagement, our tips will help you achieve a higher score.

IB Internal Assessment Rubric and Grading Criteria

The IB IA rubric is carefully structured to assess students’ understanding, skills and application of subject matter in a nuanced and comprehensive manner. Each subject rubric, whether for sciences such as Biology and Chemistry, humanities such as History and Psychology, or Mathematics, emphasizes a unique set of criteria tailored to assess specific competencies and skills.

Visual Arts IA Topics: The Best Topic Ideas

In the vast world of art, the possibilities for your IA topic are nearly limitless. Yet, this abundance of choice can sometimes feel overwhelming. Whether you’re drawn to traditional painting techniques, the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, or the intersection of digital media and art, your chosen topic should ignite a spark of curiosity and passion within you.

Theatre IA Topics: SL and HL Topic Ideas

Choosing the right topic for IA in the IB Theatre course is a crucial step that significantly influences your research process and overall learning experience. Whether in the Standard Level or Higher Level track, selecting your topic requires careful thought and consideration, aiming to balance personal interest with academic rigor. This guide offers a rich array of topic ideas and research questions to spark your creativity and intellectual curiosity in the vast world of theatre.

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How to Write Dazzlingly Brilliant Essays: Sharp Advice for Ambitious Students

Rachel McCombie, a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford, shares actionable tips on taking your essays from “Good” to “Outstanding.”

For ambitious students, essays are a chance to showcase academic flair, demonstrate original thinking and impress with advanced written English skills.

The best students relish the challenge of writing essays because they’re a chance to exercise academic research skills and construct interesting arguments. Essays allow you to demonstrate your knowledge, understanding and intelligence in a creative and relatively unrestricted way – provided you keep within the word count! But when lots of other people are answering the same essay question as you, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? In this article, we’re going to show you the secret of writing a truly brilliant essay.

What are essays actually for?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to write an outstanding essay, we need to go right back to basics and think about what essays are actually designed to test. Only by understanding the purpose of an essay can you really begin to understand what it is that tutors are looking for when they read your work. No matter what the academic level of the student is, essays are designed to test many things: – Knowledge – fundamentally, essays test and help consolidate what you’ve read and learned, making them an important part of the learning process, particularly for humanities subjects. – Comprehension – they test your ability to make sense of and clearly explain complex concepts and issues. – They test your ability to understand the question and produce a considered response to it. – They evaluate your ability to absorb and condense information from a variety of sources , which will probably mean covering a lot of material in a short space of time; this necessitates appraisal of which bits of material are relevant and which are not. – They test your ability to write a balanced and coherent argument that considers a number of points of view. – They showcase your level of written English skills. – They even put your time management to the test – essays are a part of your workload that must be planned, prioritised and delivered to a high standard, to deadline.

Characteristics of the perfect essay

Now that we know why we’re asked to write essays, what are the characteristics that define the essays that impress? The tutors marking your essays may have their own preferences and things they look for in outstanding essays, but let’s take a look at a few of the irrefutable traits of the best.

Original thinking

The hallmark of the truly brilliant essay is original thinking. That doesn’t have to mean coming up with an entirely new theory; most of, if not all, the topics you’ll be studying at GCSE , A-level or even undergraduate level have been thought about in so much depth and by so many people that virtually every possible angle will have been thought of already. But what it does mean is that the essay stands out from those of other students in that it goes beyond the obvious and takes an original approach – perhaps approaching the topic from a different angle, coming up with a different hypothesis from what you’ve been discussing in class, or introducing new evidence and intelligent insights from material not included on the reading list.

Solid, in-depth knowledge and understanding

It goes without saying that the brilliant essay should demonstrate a strong knowledge of the facts, and not just knowledge but sound comprehension of the concepts or issues being discussed and why they matter. The perfect essay demonstrates an ability to deploy relevant facts and use them to form the basis of an argument or hypothesis. It covers a wide range of material and considers every point of view, confidently making use of and quoting from a variety of sources.

Clear structure with intelligent debate

The perfect essay provides a coherent discussion of both sides of the story, developing a balanced argument throughout, and with a conclusion that weighs up the evidence you’ve covered and perhaps provides your own intelligent opinion on how the topic should be interpreted based on the evidence covered.

No superfluous information

Everything written in the perfect essay serves a purpose – to inform and persuade. There’s no rambling or going off at tangents – it sticks to the point and doesn’t waste the reader’s time. This goes back to our earlier point about sorting the relevant facts from the irrelevant material; including material that isn’t relevant shows that you’ve not quite grasped the real heart of the matter.

Exceptional English

The words in the perfect essay flow effortlessly, and the reader feels in safe hands. Sentences need never be read more than once to be understood, and each follows logically on from the next, with no random jumping about from topic to topic from one paragraph to the next. Spelling and grammar are flawless, with no careless typos. So how do you go about writing this mythical Perfect Essay? Read on to find out!

Put in extra background work

Committed students always read beyond what the reading list tells them to read. Guaranteed to impress, wide reading gives you deeper knowledge than your peers and gives you the extra knowledge and insights you need to make your essay stand out. If you’re studying English, for example, don’t just read the set text! Here are some ideas to widen your reading and give you a good range of impressive quotes to include in your essay: – Other works by the same author – how do they compare with your set text? – Works by contemporary authors – does your set text fit into a wider movement, or is it very different from what was being written at the time? – Works by the author’s predecessors – what works inspired the author of your set text? How do you see them shining through in the text you’re studying, and how have they been developed? – Literary criticism – gauge the range of opinions about your set text by reading what the literary critics have to say. Whose opinion do you most agree with, and why? – Background history – so that you can appreciate and refer to the context in which the author was writing (we’ll come back to this last point a little later). It sounds like a lot of extra work, but you don’t necessarily have to read everything in full. It’s fine to dip into these other resources providing you don’t inadvertently take points out of context.

Know what you want to say before you start writing

You’re probably sick of hearing this particular piece of advice, but it’s important to start out with a clear idea in your mind of what you want to say in your essay and how you will structure your arguments. The easiest way to do this is to write an essay plan. This needn’t be a big deal, or time-consuming; all you need to do is to open a new document on your computer, type out the ideas you want to cover and drag and drop them into a logical order. From there, you simply start typing your essay directly into the plan itself. Your essay should include an introduction, a series of paragraphs that develop an argument rather than just jumping from topic to topic, and a conclusion that weighs up the evidence.

Answer the question you’ve been set, not the question you want to answer

A common problem with students’ responses to essays is that rather than answering the question they’ve been set , they try to mould the question to what they’d prefer to write about, because that’s what they feel most comfortable with. Be very careful not to do this! You could end up writing a brilliant essay, but if didn’t actually answer the question then it’s not going to be well received by the person marking it.

Give a balanced argument…

Good essays give both sides of an argument, presenting information impartially and considering multiple points of view. One-sided arguments won’t impress, as you need to show that you’ve thought about the evidence comprehensively.

…but your opinion and interpretation matter too

Show that you’ve made your own mind up based on your weighing up of the evidence. This shows that you’re not just hiding behind what other people say about the topic, but that you’ve had the independence of mind to form your own intelligent opinion about it.

Quote liberally

Use quotations from academic works and sources to back up points you want to make. Doing so strengthens your argument by providing evidence for your statements, as well as demonstrating that you’ve read widely around your subject. However, don’t go too far and write an essay that’s essentially just a list of what other people say about the subject. Quoting too much suggests that you don’t have the confidence or knowledge to explain things in your own words, so have to hide behind those of other people. Make your own mind up about what you’re writing about – as already mentioned, it’s fine to state your own opinion if you’ve considered the arguments and presented the evidence.

Context matters

As we’ve already touched on, if you can demonstrate knowledge of the context of the subject you’re writing about, this will show that you’ve considered possible historical influences that may have shaped a work or issue. This shows that you haven’t simply taken the essay question at face value and demonstrates your ability to think beyond the obvious. An ability to look at the wider picture marks you out as an exceptional student, as many people can’t see the wood for the trees and have a very narrow focus when it comes to writing essays. If you’re an English student, for instance, an author’s work should be considered not in isolation but in the context of the historical events and thinking that helped define the period in which the author was writing. You can’t write about Blake’s poetry without some knowledge and discussion of background events such as the Industrial Revolution, and the development of the Romantic movement as a whole.

Include images and diagrams

You know what they say – a picture speaks a thousand words. What matters in an essay is effective and persuasive communication, and if a picture or diagram will help support a point you’re making, include it. As well as helping to communicate, visuals also make your essay more enjoyable to read for the person marking it – and if they enjoy reading it, the chances are you’ll get better marks! Don’t forget to ensure that you include credits for any images and diagrams you include.

Use full academic citations and a bibliography

Show you mean business by including a full set of academic citations, with a bibliography at the end, even if you haven’t been told to. The great thing about this is that it not only makes you look organised and scholarly, but it also gives you the opportunity to show off just how many extra texts you’ve studied to produce your masterpiece of an essay! Make use of the footnote feature in your word processor and include citations at the bottom of each page, with a main bibliography at the end of the essay. There are different accepted forms for citing an academic reference, but the main thing to remember is to pick one format and be consistent. Typically the citation will include the title and author of the work, the date of publication and the page number(s) of the point or quotation you’re referring to. Here’s an example: 1. Curta, F. (2007) – “Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology” in Early Medieval Europe 15 (2), pp. 159-185

Before you ask, no, a spell check isn’t good enough! How many times have you typed “form” instead of “from”? That’s just one of a huge number of errors that spell check would simply miss. Your English should be impeccable if you want to be taken seriously, and that means clear and intelligent sentence structures, no misplaced apostrophes, no typos and no grammar crimes. Include your name at the top of each page of your essay, and number the pages. Also, make sure you use a font that’s easy to read, such as Times New Roman or Arial. The person marking your essay won’t appreciate having to struggle through reading a fancy Gothic font, even if it does happen to match the Gothic literature you’re studying!

Meet the deadline

You don’t need us to tell you that, but for the sake of being comprehensive, we’re including it anyway. You could write the best essay ever, but if you deliver it late, it won’t be looked upon favourably! Don’t leave writing your essay until the last minute – start writing with plenty of time to spare, and ideally leave time to sleep on it before you submit it. Allowing time for it to sink in may result in you having a sudden brilliant revelation that you want to include. So there we have it – everything you need to know in order to write an essay to impress. If you want to get ahead, you might also want to think about attending an English summer school .

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EXPLORE Random Article

How to Write an Interesting Book

Last Updated: September 11, 2021

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 29 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 58,149 times.

Writing an interesting book can be a difficult process, especially if you want to write a best-seller. Attracting readers is important, but keeping their attention can be hard. Whether you're attempting to write a novel, autobiography, field guide, or anything in particular, this guide will provide you with important tools in writing an interesting book.

Be as original as possible. While it may be tempting to use cliches, it may discourage people from continuing reading, especially if they've already read other books similar to yours. Giving them a fresh and new book will capture their interest and encourage them to purchase it.

You could try writing a sentence like, "A burnt smell swept through the air. With a yelp, I dropped the garden hose and dashed towards the house, hoping the kitchen hadn't burnt down. I pounded up the back porch stairs and burst into the kitchen, nearly crashing into my grandfather."

Step 3 Create interesting, realistic characters if appropriate.

Note that a literary agent may not be necessary. If you're planning on convincing a big publisher to publish your book, then you may need to hire an agent to help you. However, if you're approaching a small company, you might not need one.

Step 6 Submit your materials to a publisher.

Remember that the process can be slow, and not every publisher may want you. You may be rejected the first time, but don't give up. Many authors have to resubmit their work several times before they're accepted. You can send your manuscript to more than one publisher at a time, but be sure that they allow simultaneous submissions.

Community Q&A

When including detail, do your best to add enough so that your reader feels as if they're in the situation or place. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
Allow the book to come to a natural end. Attempting to force an ending can make your story seem unrealistic, and it may disappoint your readers. If you're uncertain about how to finish your book, you can leave it as an open ending. For instance, you could end it with a short, snappy line, which leads to another book. Or you could end it with your characters going to a new location. You could also have a mysterious ending that leaves readers wondering what will happen next. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
Carry a notebook with you everywhere you go. That way, you can quickly jot down ideas. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
Make sure you want to write a book. You'll only waste your time if you start writing but give up after a few pages. Thanks Helpful 10 Not Helpful 1
Don't use copyrighted information. Thanks Helpful 9 Not Helpful 2
Don't use someone else's ideas. You don't want to be sued for copyright infringement. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 0

Things You'll Need

A computer or a lot of paper and pencils
A printer or CD
A publisher

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone. Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read Would Everybody Please Stop? is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food, Longthroat Memoirs is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails, Longthroat Memoirs explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as The Believer , The New Yorker , and Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In Look Alive Out There, whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on Gossip Girl, befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview, Idiophone is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch . From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick , Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays by Samantha Irby

“With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays by Scaachi Koul

“In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead Rolling Stone to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues, Shrewed is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber), Double Bind could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God) by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else. We Wear the Mask , edited by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes, A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico. Acid West illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening, Acid West is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives. Sexographies is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This? presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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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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Essay on The Most Interesting book I read

Our school library is having books which I like very much. One of my friends showed me a certain book in the library and he said that is his favorite book. He also said that is was the second part of the most famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain.

I borrowed the book from the librarian on the advice of my friend. When I went home that day, I had an immediate lunch, when to my room and started reading the book.

Home interesting was it! It was a wonderful book. The book was full of adventures. The main character was Huckleberry Finn who was a poor English boy whose father was a third class drunkard. This father wanted to get his son’s fortune which he get previously in yet another adventure with Tom Sawyer, his friend. So Finn runs away from the custody of his father and meet another boy. This boy was Jim who had been running away from master. He had been a slave boy.

The two friends go to the sea and get on to a ship. They become friendly with the seamen and go on fishing. They also go to various island in the sea and engage themselves in many adventures. At last they come home. Finn finds that his father had died and hi was no more in danger. Jim also get his freedom with Finn’s help.

This interesting children’s novel had been written by well-known English Author Mark Twain who had previously written the famous book Tom Sawyer. Both these books are popular even today. So many millions of children throughout the English speaking world must have read these books. Much more than Tom Sawyer, it was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was the most interesting book I have ever read.

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Describe an Exciting Book You Read: Sample Answers of IELTS Cue Card 2021 Topic

Often candidates find IELTS Speaking difficult. It is a face-to-face interview with the examiner and hence candidates often find it difficult to communicate. Especially cue cards as in here they have to speak on a random topic for a minute or two.

In this article, we have demonstrated the correct way to write sample answers to a topic describe an exciting book you read.

IELTS Speaking Module

IELTS test is a standardized English language test for candidates who want to take admission in foreign universities or go to foreign for work purposes.

It has four sections including reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Also Read: Describe a Poisonous Plant in your Country: Solved IELTS Cue Card 2021 Answer

Cue Card- IELTS Speaking Module

In the cue card part of the IELTS speaking module, test takers will be given a cue card with a random topic. Candidates will be given one minute to think about the cue card topic and then speak for at least one minute.

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read Cue Card Topic

Describe an exciting book you have read – sample answer one.

Thank you for allowing me to speak about my favourite book. I am quite a bibliophile and thus I have quite a big collection of books with myself. But if I have to speak about the book that I found most intriguing then it would surely be Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone .

This is a fantasy novel that revolves around a boy and a magical world. The writer has created a new world of witches and wizards. The book was so interesting that whenever I read it I got transported to a different world.

The story begins with the introduction of the main protagonist Harry Potter. He is an orphan and lives with his uncle and aunt. They treat him like a pushover and compel him to live under the stairs. Until his 13th birthday, everything was just worse around him.

As soon as he turns 13th, he gets a letter from Hogwarts, a magical school. This letter is delivered by an owl and demands him to be present in the school for further studies in magic.

Soon he finds that he is a half-blood wizard and his parents die fighting the strongest wizard of the magical world. And thus his journey as a wizard and saving the whole wizardry world begins. In this journey, he is accompanied by his best friends Ron Weasley, a pure-blood wizard, and Hermione Granger, a muggle-born witch.

This is the first series of the book and one of the best too. This series is written by JK Rowling and is also adapted in the film series. This is an interesting book and never fails to excite me.

Also Read: Describe an Adventurous Thing You Did When You Were a Child: An Interesting IELTS Cue Card Topic

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read – Sample Answer Two

Today I would like to speak on the Tempest that is written by the most famous writer and dramatist in the world, William Shakespeare.

As the name suggests this story revolves around a Storm. A storm that brings our main protagonist to an inhabitant island and also that brings the Ill doer in the island to reap what they had sowed.

The story begins with a storm or tempest. The main female protagonist Miranda is watching the storm disturbing the calm water and then the water engulfing a ship boarded by several men. She asks her father Prospero who is also a wizard if he has raged the storm.

Then his father takes her into the flashback and tells how his brother cheated him with the help of his enemy and dethroned him and left him with his daughter in a rugged boat to the mercy of the sea. Now it’s the time for them to repent their sins.

While the story develops forwards Miranda and Prince Ferdinand fall in love with each other. And Prospero’s brother Antonio, King of Naples Alonso, and his brother Sebastian come to the Island. The King is distressed by the assumed death of his son Ferdinand. The villains realize their mistakes at the end of the story and Prospero gets his kingdom back with Miranda getting married to Ferdinand.

This story also contains some supernatural elements such as Ariel, an airy spirit, and Caliban, the half-human earth spirit. It also has comedy scenes of Trinculo and Stephano with the Caliban.

This is an interesting play written by William Shakespeare. It is a story with different stories going on in different parts of the islands. It makes me laugh, cry and also feel amazing.

Also Read: Describe a Time When You had Some Medicine: Learn the Incredible Ways to Answer in the IELTS Cue Card

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read – Sample Answer Three

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak about my favourite book. I have read countless books but if I have to speak about a specific one I would say Lord of the Rings .

The story revolves around the main antagonist Dark Lord Sauron. He is the creator of the one ring to Rule the Other rings of power he has given to men, dwarves, and elves.

The first book starts with Bilbo celebrating his 111th birthday and then suddenly leaves the Shire, his hometown. Somehow he has the position of the ultimate ring and he passes the ring to his cousin and heir Frodo Baggins.

After knowing the truth of the ring by wizard Gandalf he embarks on the journey to discover the whole truth. In his journey, he is joined by other hobbits Sam Gamgee, Pippins Took, and Merry Brandybuck. Also Gandalf, Elf Legolas, Dwarf Gimli, Men of Aragon, and Boromir of Gondor.

The book has magical elements where the Dark Lord Sauron tries to capture the ring from the Hobbit. It revolves around the main theme of good and evil, death and immortality, and other important themes.

It is an interesting book as you would never find a single moment where you get bored. It is filled with suspense, thrill, and mystery. It also contains magic and comedy scenes.

Also Read: Describe a Person Who Solved a Problem in Smart Way: Answers IELTS Cue Card 2021-22

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read – Sample Answer Four

Today I would like to speak about Kidnapped , a famous novel written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.

The main protagonist of the story is David Balfour, a 17 years old boy. After the death of his parents, he got a letter from the minister of Essendean, Mr. Campbell that he is the owner of the House of Shaws in Cramond.

After reaching increment David gets to know that the House of Shaws is an ominous place where his paranoid uncle Ebenezer lives. His uncle first refuses to let him stay but when everyone supports him as he is the lawful owner of the house his uncle lets him stay.

Later his uncle tricks him and sells him to the pirates as a slave. And hence the book got this title Kidnapped. He starts living as a crew member of the ship. After that, he joins hands with a man, Alan Breck Stewart, and defeats the murderous Shaun and his men.

But soon the ship gets stuck in the storm and breaks down. David gets separated from Alan and gets washed away on the nearby Island. Later he rejoins with Alan and their journey begins.

They fight together and in the end, David gets his revenge on his cruel Uncle. And also he got reinstated as a lawful heir of the House of Shaws

It is an interesting book as it involves how a 17-year-old embarks on an adventurous journey. This story revolves around the main theme of justice and also how truth triumphs over evil.

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read – Sample Answer Five

Thank you for this opportunity. Today I would like to speak about a book from the famous fantasy series Harry Potter. This series has 7 books among which are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows .

This is the final book of the Harry Potter series written by JK Rowling. The story begins with Voldemort and his death eaters planning to kidnap Harry Potter during his evacuation. On the other hand, Harry Potter is packing his stuff while regretting the death of Albus Dumbledore. Soon the order of phoenix members joins him to help him evacuate.

Mad-eye Moody gives Polyjuice potion to Ron, Fred, George, Hermione, and Mundungus to disguise themselves as Harry Potter. They are accompanied by Nymphadora Tonks, Remus Lupin, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Bill Weasley, and Alastor Moody. After a thrilling encounter with Voldemort and his Death Eater, they somehow reach safely yet injured.

After this, they enjoy the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. But the wedding is crashed by Death Eater and ultimately Harry Potter evaluates the safe zone set up at Weasley house.

They are joined by Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. They embark on a difficult journey and unfold many secrets such as the secret of the gift of death, Horcrux, and many others.

At the end of the story, he finds that the professor he despised the most, Severus Snape, has always protected him since his birth as he loved his mother Lily Potter. Also he throughout the books destroys the Horcrux in which Voldemort has stored his soul.

Also, he ultimately destroys Voldemort and his death eater. This book is the most interesting part of the Harry Potter series. It is packed with thrill, mystery, adventure, and love. The orphan Harry is saved by the love of their mother twice and also his friends stake their lives for his safety.

Also Read: Describe a Good Law in Favour of Women: Get the Answers for IELTS Cue Card for 2021-22

Describe an Exciting Book You have Read – Sample Answer Six

If I have to speak about a book that I find interesting then it would surely be Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare.

This story is set in Venice around the mediaeval period of Europe. The story starts with a young Venetian Bassanio who is dreaming of his sweetheart Portia of Belmont. He has already spent his fortune to afford the lifestyle as a wealthy merchant and now he has nothing to go on as a suitor. He approaches his friend Antonio and asks him to provide him with around 3000 ducats. To which his friend responds that he is also suffering losses because of the loss he has incurred in the merchandise.

But he stills wants to help his friend and hence takes a loan from a Jewish Moneylender Shylock. The latter agrees as he wanted to take revenge on Antonio and hence compels them to sign a bloody contract that states that if he fails to pay the loan, then Shylock can demand a pound of flesh from his body.

Meanwhile, Bassanio is able to win Portia as his wife after successfully passing the test planned by her father. On the other hand, Shylock is determined to get revenge on Christian as his daughter Jessica elopes with a Christian boy.

When Bassanio gets a letter from Antonio about the forfeiture of the loan contract. He immediately runs back to his hometown to save his friend. But Shylock refuses to take even the double amount of the loan.

Portia is confused at the behaviour of the Bassanio and determines to help this young man who stakes his life for his friend. She disguises herself as a lawyer and saves Antonio from the clutches of the shrewd Shylock.

The story was simple yet interesting as to how a friend stakes his life for his friend, how a woman can save Antonio cleverly. This book is remembered for its dramatic scenes.

Tips and Strategies to Ace Cue Card Topic in 2021 IELTS Exam

# Stay Confident throughout the test

# Practice as many cue card topics as you can

# Analyse the topic of the cue card

# Read the instructions and mind map how you will speak on the topic

# You can write the subtopics pics and keywords in the paper you will be given

# Don’t try to write every line in the one minute you will get to prepare for the topic

Also Read: Describe an Art Exhibition that You Visited: Excel the Cue Card Section with IELTS Ninja

IELTS cue cards can be mastered with dedication and practice. Therefore try to solve different cue topics and also read different books and essays to develop your horizon.

For more such solved cue card topics and IELTS preparation material visit the IELTS Ninja website. This website is devoted to helping candidates with their IELTS tests.

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Thanks for guiding me on how to speak on a cue card topics.

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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.

Feature image of Short Essay on the Book I Like the Most

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,

52 Ways to Write Interesting Leads – Attract and Keep Readers

by Laurie Pawlik
July 17, 2012

Your lead has to hook editors, publishers, and readers — and your introduction has to have pizzazz, razzle dazzle, and sparkle!

“Your first sentence is the most important part of the entire equation,” writes Jenna Glatzer in Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments . “Put yourself in a busy section editor’s shoes. Today, you have to make two assignments, edit two more, check up on a writer whose work is late, help a writer who is having trouble…” and the list goes on and on.

So, you need a killer hook. The first sentence has to capture the editor so fully that it will stick in her mind even after she’s sidetracked by 10 different tasks, says Glatzer.

If your writing is boring, dull, lifeless, flat, or downright dead, read Word Painting: A Guide to Write More Descriptively .

Want to Attract and Keep Readers? 52 Ways to Write Interesting Leads

Writing interesting leads will be less difficult with these helpful writing tips for “killer hooks”:

the single most interesting point in your article or essay
a current research finding (eg, “Novice freelance writers have higher blood pressure than established freelance writers.”)
an interesting fact
an element of fantasy (eg, “Imagine a time when earning a living as a writer could be as easy as eating double chocolate chip cookies.”)
a little-known event
a season of the year
an observation
a definition
a feeling, emotion, or mood
dangerous or harmful objects in everyday life
a place description
an annual holiday
a personal vacation
an intriguing question
a shocking statement (eg, “Writing interesting leads is the only part of a freelance writing career that makes someone want to tear their eyelashes out.”
good or bad advice
a verse from the Bible
a controversial idea
statistical information
a belief held by most people (eg, “Earning a living as a writer isn’t possible.”)
a specific problem
a common problem
a declarative statement (eg, “Young freelance writers have it easy these days! Back in my day…”)
a childhood memory
received wisdom (eg, “Writing guru Anne Lamott once told me…”)
a writing quip
a shared trait or quality
a dramatic, unusual, or surprising phrase
a physical or mental condition
historical figures
statements of command
an amusing or amazing encounter
a how-to lead
a current TV personality or celebrity’s actions
a current news story
a breakthrough secret revealed
a cliché or overused expression
a reference to astrology or zodiac signs
describe a nationalist idea or action
the effects of change
a special promise
an anecdote
a quotation from a movie star or celebrity
a dream or nightmare
a profession or career reference
common everyday objects
info about current and/or historical events

When you’re writing a lead, heed Jenna Glatzer’s tip in Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments :

Find examples of great introductions, such as “Joe Smith doesn’t want to be a priest anymore.” Then, figure out why that intro works.

The best, most interesting introductions create a question in the reader’s mind, such as “Why?” Or “How?”

For more tips, read 5 Steps to Writing a Killer First Chapter – How to Wow Readers .

Fellow scribes, the best way to write an interesting lead is to make the reader want to keep reading more than anything else.

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4 thoughts on “52 Ways to Write Interesting Leads – Attract and Keep Readers”

My favorite way to write an interesting lead is to grab a quotation from my source, or start with the most fascinating tidbit from a story that directly relates to my article. The introduction often writes itself – if there’s enough meat to the story (or chapter!).

dude you have no idea what you write and i am pretty sure even u dont know a thing… your thoughts are vague and arbitary and so is ur style of writing.. makes little sense… just absurd.. think before you write… possibly from the readers perspective… Good luck 🙂

I have been searching forever for this. I teach 6-8 writing and struggle every year to explain how to start off a story or essay. Now I have a handy list. Thanks so much!

Thanks for sharing these ways to begin your articles or chapters, Mike.

I especially like #1 — the idea of presenting an interesting fact that dispels a commonly held myth. Myths are SO hard to fight! That is, people seem to believe what they want to believe or what they grew up believing, even if they’re presented with evidence to the contrary. I like playing with that in my introductions. 🙂 .-= Laurie PK´s last blog post ..8 Ideas for Blog Posts or Magazine Articles at Halloween =-.

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9 Great Books on Essay Writing

By Med Kharbach, PhD | Last Update: October 17, 2023

Books on essay writing are the topic of our blog post today!

Essay writing stands as a cornerstone in education. It sharpens critical thinking, conveys ideas, and showcases understanding. Yet, mastering it isn’t just about practicing the act of writing. Reading, in all its wonder, plays a pivotal role too. By diving into books, students can absorb styles, structure, and nuances, essentially refining their own writing arsenal. It’s like training the mind, equipping it with tools for better essays. So, if one wishes to elevate their essay-writing game, turning pages is a brilliant place to start.

Image source: Unsplash

Books on Essay Writing

Here are our top picks for best books on essay writing

1. “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

“The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White is a classic in the realm of writing guides. Though not an essay writing service , this compact book acts as a mentor, offering writers techniques to enhance their craft. It champions the principles of clarity and brevity, urging writers to be concise and to the point. White and Strunk emphasize eliminating superfluous words, ensuring every word counts. For students and writers alike, this guide is a beacon, directing them towards crisp, clear, and effective prose in their essays.

2. “On Writing” by Stephen King

Stephen King’s “On Writing” provides an intimate look into the mind of one of the world’s most renowned authors. King delves deep, sharing personal anecdotes intertwined with invaluable insights on the craft of writing.

He firmly believes in the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing. According to King, a good writer must be an avid reader. Moreover, he emphasizes the necessity of discipline, asserting that consistent effort and dedication are key to refining one’s craft.

3. “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott offers a heartfelt dive into the tumultuous world of writing. Lamott presents her journey, riddled with challenges and moments of self-doubt, providing solace to writers everywhere.

One of her most resonating pieces of advice is on the nature of first drafts. She reassures that they are meant to be rough and imperfect. Lamott emphasizes that perfectionism is the adversary of creativity, urging writers to let go and simply get the words down, refining as they go along.

4. “How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One” by Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish’s “How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One” is a deep dive into the essence of sentences. Fish examines the intricate art and craft behind constructing a sentence, illuminating the rhythm, structure, and beauty inherent in them.

His analysis doesn’t just focus on the technicalities but ventures into what elevates a sentence from good to great. According to Fish, a great sentence captivates, conveying both meaning and emotion. It’s not just about stringing words together but creating a symphony that resonates with the reader.

5. “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

6. “reading like a writer” by francine prose.

In “Reading Like a Writer,” Francine Prose delves into the practice of absorbing literature through the discerning lens of a writer. Rather than just skimming pages, she promotes truly engaging with the text.

Prose champions the art of close reading, urging writers to dissect language, structure, and rhythm. By immersing deeply, one uncovers layers of craftsmanship, benefiting from insights that can be mirrored in one’s own writing. This method, Prose argues, not only enhances comprehension but also enriches the writer’s toolbox, nurturing the journey from reader to adept writer.

7. “The Sense of Style” by Steven Pinker

“The Sense of Style” by Steven Pinker is not your conventional style guide. Instead, Pinker brings a fresh, modern perspective, intertwining linguistics with style.

Pinker places a strong emphasis on coherence and clarity, advocating for a balance between rules and artistry in writing. But what truly distinguishes this guide is Pinker’s delve into the science of language. He unravels the psychology behind good writing, providing readers not just rules to follow, but an understanding of why certain styles resonate more deeply. This book stands as a bridge between traditional grammar and the evolving nuances of effective communication.

8. “Writing With Power” by Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow’s “Writing With Power” provides valuable insights into the liberating practice of free writing. Emphasizing the importance of letting ideas flow without judgment, he showcases techniques that many consider the best essay writing service one can give to oneself.

Elbow believes in the power of uncensored writing to generate raw, authentic ideas. To tackle the all-too-familiar writer’s block, he offers strategies that center on continuous writing without overthinking. By doing so, writers can navigate around mental barriers and unearth genuine thoughts and expressions, making the writing process both therapeutic and productive.

9. “The Writer’s Journey” by Christopher Vogler

“The Writer’s Journey” by Christopher Vogler explores the timeless pattern of the hero’s journey, a narrative structure pervasive in myths and stories worldwide. Vogler meticulously unpacks this universal motif, revealing its applicability to various forms of writing, essays included.

Understanding the hero’s journey allows writers to craft compelling narratives, even within the constraints of an essay. It offers a framework for organizing ideas and creating a flow that engages readers. With the wisdom gleaned from this book, one can construct essays that are not just informative but also captivating and resonant.

Reading is an indispensable ally in honing essay writing skills. The books discussed not only offer techniques but inspire deeper connections with words and ideas. To truly elevate one’s essay craft, immersing in these literary treasures is invaluable. By diving into these pages, readers can glean insights and strategies that will undoubtedly enrich their essays, making them more compelling and resonant. So, let the journey of exploration begin.

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Meet Med Kharbach, PhD

Dr. Med Kharbach is an influential voice in the global educational technology landscape, with an extensive background in educational studies and a decade-long experience as a K-12 teacher. Holding a Ph.D. from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, he brings a unique perspective to the educational world by integrating his profound academic knowledge with his hands-on teaching experience. Dr. Kharbach's academic pursuits encompass curriculum studies, discourse analysis, language learning/teaching, language and identity, emerging literacies, educational technology, and research methodologies. His work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in various esteemed academic journals.

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AI’s ability to write for us—and our inability to resist ‘The Button’—will spark a crisis of meaning in creative work

"Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI," by Ethan Mollick.

Soon, every major office application and email client will include a button to help you create a draft of your work. It deserves capital letters: The Button.

When faced with the tyranny of the blank page, people are going to push The Button. It is so much easier to start with something than nothing. Students are going to use it to start essays. Managers will use it to start emails, reports, or documents. Teachers will use it when providing feedback. Scientists will use it to write grants. Concept artists will use it for their first draft. Everyone is going to use The Button.

The implications of having AI write our first drafts (even if we do the work ourselves, which is not a given) are huge. One consequence is that we could lose our creativity and originality. When we use AI to generate our first drafts, we tend to anchor on the first idea that the machine produces, which influences our future work. Even if we rewrite the drafts completely, they will still be tainted by the AI’s influence. We will not be able to explore different perspectives and alternatives, which could lead to better solutions and insights.

Another consequence is that we could reduce the quality and depth of our thinking and reasoning. When we use AI to generate our first drafts, we don’t have to think as hard or as deeply about what we write. We rely on the machine to do the hard work of analysis and synthesis, and we don’t engage in critical and reflective thinking ourselves. We also miss the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and feedback and the chance to develop our own style.

AI can do it

There is already evidence that this is going to be a problem. A recent MIT study found that ChatGPT mostly serves as a substitute for human effort, not a complement to our skills. In fact, the vast majority of participants didn’t even bother editing the AI’s output. This is a problem I see repeatedly when people first use AI: they just paste in the exact question they are asked and let the AI answer it.

A lot of work is time-consuming by design. In a world in which the AI gives an instant, pretty good, near universally accessible shortcut, we’ll soon face a crisis of meaning in creative work of all kinds. This is, in part, because we expect creative work to take careful thought and revision, but also that time often operates as a stand-in for work. Take, for example, the letter of recommendation. Professors are asked to write letters for students all the time, and a good letter takes a long time to write. You have to understand the student and the reason for the letter, decide how to phrase the letter to align with the job requirements and the student’s strengths, and more. The fact that it is time-consuming is somewhat the point. That a professor takes the time to write a good letter is a sign that they support the student’s application. We are setting our time on fire to signal to others that this letter is worth reading.

Or we can push The Button.

And the problem is that the letter the AI generates is going to be good. Not just grammatically correct, but persuasive and insightful to a human reader. It is going to be better than most letters of recommendation that I receive. This means that not only is the quality of the letter no longer a signal of the professor’s interest, but also that you may actually be hurting people by not writing a letter of recommendation by AI, especially if you are not a particularly strong writer. So people now have to consider that the goal of the letter (getting a student a job) is in contrast with the morally correct method of accomplishing the goal (the professor spending a lot of time writing the letter). I am still doing all my letters the old-fashioned way, but I wonder whether that will ultimately do my students a disservice.

Now consider all the other tasks whose final written output is important because it is a signal of the time spent on the task and of the thoughtfulness that went into it—performance reviews, strategic memos, college essays, grant applications, speeches, comments on papers. And so much more.

Reconstructing meaning

Then The Button starts to tempt everyone. Work that was boring to do but meaningful when completed by humans (like performance reviews) becomes easy to outsource—and the apparent quality actually increases. We start to create documents mostly with AI that get sent to AI-powered inboxes, where the recipients respond primarily with AI. Even worse, we still create the reports by hand but realize that no human is actually reading them. This kind of meaningless task, what organizational theorists have called mere ceremony, has always been with us. But AI will make a lot of previously useful tasks meaningless. It will also remove the facade that previously disguised meaningless tasks. We may not have always known if our work mattered in the bigger picture, but in most organizations, the people in your part of the organizational structure felt it did. With AI-generated work sent to other AIs to assess, that sense of meaning disappears.

We are going to need to reconstruct meaning, in art and in the rituals of creative work. This is not an easy process, but we have done it before, many times. Where musicians once made money from records, they now depend on being excellent live performers. When photography made realistic oil paintings obsolete, artists started pushing the bounds of photography as art. When the spreadsheet made adding data by hand unneeded, clerks shifted their responsibilities to bigger-picture issues. This change in meaning is going to have a large effect on work.

Excerpted with permission from Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI , by Ethan Mollick, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Ethan Mollick, 2024.

Ethan Mollick is a professor of management at Wharton, specializing in entrepreneurship and innovation. He writes the AI-focused blog One Useful Thing and is the creator of numerous educational games on a variety of topics.

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Taylor Swift’s ‘Poets’ Arrives With a Promotional Blitz (and a Second LP)

The pop superstar’s latest album was preceded by a satellite radio channel, a word game, a return to TikTok and an actual library. For her fans, more is always welcome.

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The album cover for Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” which depicts the star lying on pillows in sleepwear, draping her arms over her body.

By Ben Sisario

Taylor Swift was already the most ubiquitous pop star in the galaxy, her presence dominating the music charts, the concert calendar, the Super Bowl, the Grammys.

Then it came time for her to promote a new album.

In the days leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, Swift became all but inescapable, online and seemingly everywhere else. Her lyrics were the basis for an Apple Music word game . A Spotify-sponsored, Swift-branded “ library installation ,” in muted pink and gray, popped up in a shopping complex in Los Angeles. In Chicago, a QR code painted on a brick wall directed fans to another Easter egg on YouTube. Videos on Swift’s social media accounts, showing antique typewriters and globes with pins, were dissected for clues about her music. SiriusXM added a Swift radio station; of course it’s called Channel 13 (Taylor’s Version).

About the only thing Swift didn’t do was an interview with a journalist.

At this stage in Swift’s career, an album release is more than just a moment to sell music; it’s all but a given that “The Tortured Poets Department” will open with gigantic sales numbers, many of them for “ghost white,” “phantom clear” and other collector-ready vinyl variants . More than that, the album’s arrival is a test of the celebrity-industrial complex overall, with tech platforms and media outlets racing to capture whatever piece of the fan frenzy they can get.

Threads, the newish social media platform from Meta, primed Swifties for their idol’s arrival there, and offered fans who shared Swift’s first Threads post a custom badge. Swift stunned the music industry last week by breaking ranks with her record label, Universal, and returning her music to TikTok, which Universal and other industry groups have said pays far too little in royalties. Overnight, TikTok unveiled “The Ultimate Taylor Swift In-App Experience,” offering fans digital goodies like a “Tortured Poets-inspired animation” on their feed.

Before the album’s release on Friday, Swift revealed that a music video — for “Fortnight,” the first single, featuring Post Malone — would arrive on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. At 2 a.m., she had another surprise: 15 more songs. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” she wrote in a social media post , bringing “The Anthology” edition of the album to 31 tracks.

“The Tortured Poets Department,” which Swift, 34, announced in a Grammy acceptance speech in February — she had the Instagram post ready to go — lands as Swift’s profile continues to rise to ever-higher levels of cultural saturation.

Her Eras Tour , begun last year, has been a global phenomenon, crashing Ticketmaster and lifting local economies ; by some estimates, it might bring in as much as $2 billion in ticket sales — by far a new record — before it ends later this year. Swift’s romance with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has been breathlessly tracked from its first flirtations last summer to their smooch on the Super Bowl field in February. The mere thought that Swift might endorse a presidential candidate this year sent conspiracy-minded politicos reeling .

“The Tortured Poets Department” — don’t even ask about the missing apostrophe — arrived accompanied by a poem written by Stevie Nicks that begins, “He was in love with her/Or at least she thought so.” That establishes what many fans correctly anticipated as the album’s theme of heartbreak and relationship rot, Swift’s signature topic. “I love you/It’s ruining my life,” she sings on “Fortnight.”

Fans were especially primed for the fifth track, “So Long, London,” given that (1) Swift has said she often sequences her most vulnerable and emotionally intense songs fifth on an LP, and (2) the title suggested it may be about Joe Alwyn, the English actor who was Swift’s boyfriend for about six years, reportedly until early 2023 . Indeed, “So Long” is an epic breakup tune, with lines like “You left me at the house by the heath” and “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” Tracks from the album leaked on Wednesday, and fans have also interpreted some songs as being about Matty Healy , the frontman of the band the 1975, whom Swift was briefly linked to last year.

The album’s title song starts with a classic Swift detail of a memento from a lost love: “You left your typewriter at my apartment/Straight from the tortured poets department.” It also name-drops Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith and, somewhat surprisingly given that company, Charlie Puth, the singer-songwriter who crooned the hook on Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” a No. 1 hit in 2015. (Swift has praised Wiz Khalifa and that song in the past.)

Other big moments include “Florida!!!,” featuring Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, in which Swift declares — after seven big percussive bangs — that the state “is one hell of a drug.” Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers and songwriters who have been Swift’s primary collaborators in recent years, both worked on “Tortured Poets,” bringing their signature mix of moody, pulsating electronic tracks and delicate acoustic moments, like a bare piano on “Loml” (as in “love of my life”).

As the ninth LP Swift has released in five years, “Tortured Poets” is the latest entry in a remarkable creative streak. That includes five new studio albums and four rerecordings of her old music — each of which sailed to No. 1. When Swift played SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles in August, she spoke from the stage about her recording spurt, saying that the forced break from touring during the Covid-19 pandemic had spurred her to connect with fans by releasing more music.

“And so I decided, in order to keep that connection going,” she said , “if I couldn’t play live shows with you, I was going to make and release as many albums as humanly possible.”

That was two albums ago.

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

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She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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