Introducing Cover to Cover

If you’re an avid reader of the Century, you might notice that we publish on our website every week a very short book review that seemingly has no author and is written in a fairly neutral voice. In the print magazine and the downloadable pdf version, these reviews, called BookMarks, appear at the end of the book review section. They cover a range of books, from academic to popular nonfiction to fiction.

You’ll continue to find the BookMarks in the print magazine and the pdf version, but on our new website we’re replacing them with something even better: this blog. The same books will be covered, but in the blog I’ll write about them more transparently, at more length, and with the occasional sass. Here's an example (although in this particular case there isn’t a whole lot of sass. My sassy side tends to be dormant during Advent.)

I’ll also sometimes blog about books that aren’t covered in the print magazine at all. Here's an example. (Also without sass. My sassy side is tempered when I'm reading and writing about mass incarceration.)

If you read this blog regularly, at the very least you’ll learn about some of the most recent books to be published. If you’re an introvert, you may find something new that you can talk about at that dinner party when the silence in the conversation becomes painful. If you preach, you might find fodder for sermons. If you love books, you’ll get periodic glimpses into new manifestations of the object of your love.

I hope you’ll be edified. I hope you’ll critique and comment on the things I write about what I’m reading. I hope this will be the beginning of an ongoing conversation.