2023
June
01
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

June 01, 2023
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Ira Porter
Education Writer

Currently I have 99 problems and lack of time is the biggest one. I bemoan not having enough time to read every single book that I scooped up recently at Publishers Weekly’s first in-person U.S. Book Show in New York City.

Where do I go from here? Summer doesn’t last forever, but I feel like my reading list does. My fellow bibliophiles and logophiles know the excitement of looking at piles of clean, handsome books with interesting covers. We gather in bookstores and exchange knowing glances of which titles we will open first.

We ponder over prose that confounds, teaches, inspires, and challenges us. We have been enraptured by stories that have taken our imaginations on trips of heroic displays of bravery in the face of dystopian cruelty or wondrous fantasy, and we’ve been on crime-solving missions alongside Miss Marple and other would-be sleuths.

When I stepped foot inside the book show, I wanted to shape-shift into an eight-arm octopus to grab every galley. I got some, but other titles were too popular and earlier birds with quicker hands beat me to them.

Here are some of my notable finds. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D spoke about his “Naphic Grovel” titled “Stewdio,” which features original artwork and social commentary. If his prose and art match his lyricism, the book will be well worth the read. And Sarah Jessica Parker praised author Kim Coleman Foote about her forthcoming novel, “Coleman Hill,” which is on Ms. Parker’s SJP imprint. It is the story of a Black family’s migration to New Jersey from the Jim Crow South, full of colorful language that puts me in the mind of a Zora Neale Hurston novel. 

A panel of debut authors and their works also sounded promising, including Alice Carrière and her memoir, “Everything/Nothing/Someone”; Kelsey James and her novel, “The Woman in the Castello”; and Terah Shelton Harris and her novel, “One Summer in Savannah.”

I will get through the books that I grabbed. My question for everyone else is, what’s on your summer reading list?


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Nasser Nasser/AP
Jordan's Crown Prince Hussein and Saudi architect Rajwa Alseif wave to well-wishers during their wedding ceremonies in Amman, Jordan, June 1, 2023.

Graphic

Amr Nabil/AP/File
A "Verynile" initiative worker carries compressed plastic bottles that were collected by volunteers and fishermen from the Nile to build a Plastic Pyramid ahead of World Cleanup Day in Cairo, Egypt, Sept. 15, 2022. This week an important second round of talks is underway in Paris, aiming toward a global treaty on fighting plastic pollution.

Why UN talks this week focus on just one word: Plastics

SOURCE:

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Points of Progress

What's going right
Universal Pictures
Marquis “Mookie” Cook stars as a young LeBron James in the film "Shooting Stars." The movie, streaming on Peacock, is based on a memoir co-authored by Mr. James.

The Monitor's View

AP
Two guests take a selfie in front of sculptures in the courtyard of the Sursock Museum during an opening event for the iconic venue in Beirut, Lebanon, May 26. The museum has reopened to the public, three years after a deadly explosion in the nearby Beirut port reduced many of its treasured paintings and collections to ashes.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

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Eugene Hoshiko/AP
Workers at the Polish Embassy in Tokyo prepare to ship the 16th-century Italian painting "Madonna with Child," attributed to Alessandro Turchi, on June 1, 2023. The Baroque work, which was looted from a private Polish collection in World War II by Nazi Germany, was discovered in Japan and has been returned to Poland.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow, when we’ll have a column on the new animated “Spider-Man” sequel.

More issues

2023
June
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