A Buffet of Bookish Goodness

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

To Read, or Not to Read

It’s Shakespeare day on Zero to Well-Read. If it’s been a while since you hung out with the Bard—or if you’ve never read him—I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy in our conversation about Hamlet.

Making this podcast is the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time (and my job is usually pretty great). Spending time with truly great works has turned out to be exactly the antidote I needed to dopamine-fueled algorithms. I’m on track to read significantly more books this year than I have in the last several years, and it’s because the more time I spend with really good books, the more time I want to spend reading (and the less I’m willing to spend scrolling).

Take Your Pick

It’s a quiet morning on the internet, due, I suspect, to yesterday’s widespread outages. Here’s a look at what I’m reading and thinking about today.

• Vox‘s Constance Grady explores what a passage from Mansfield Park might reveal about Jane Austen’s perspective on slavery
• Karl Ove Knausgaard on the question at the heart of The Brothers Karamazov
• The editors of Vogue recommend the season’s best books, movies, music, and more
• Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson’s reflections on reading Shakespeare for the first time in his 40s
• At The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber goes long on the decline/evolution of criticism and the internet of it all
• It’s the last day to shop Powell’s 20% sitewide flash sale.
• Critic A.O. Scott offers a close reading of a scene from Slow Horses that captures the series’ greatness. Someday, I will get to the Slough House books.