THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 25, 2023: The Reading Crisis by @aoscott; ‘Little Monsters’ by @adriennebrodeur; ‘The Art Thief’ by @MikeFinkel and more…

Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?

This image features a folded pair of black frame glasses. The left lens is tinted yellow. The right lens is clear but fractured, as if the glass has been hit by something hard.

Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield.

By A.O. Scott

Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it. But bubbling underneath this bland, upbeat consensus is a simmer of individual anxiety and collective panic. We are in the throes of a reading crisis.

Family Politics as a Predictor of Mayhem on a Bigger Scale

In her new novel, “Little Monsters,” Adrienne Brodeur takes readers on a stressful march toward a patriarch’s 70th birthday party.

By MARY POLS

Adrienne Brodeur’s “Little Monsters” is cleverly calculated to push all the buttons for a wide swath of women. Like her 2019 memoir “Wild Game,” which examined the role Brodeur played in her mother’s long affair with a family friend, “Little Monsters” is a tale of dysfunction and buried secrets, set in and around moneyed Cape Cod.