What We Are Reading Today: Names for Light

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Updated 23 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Names for Light

  • While her family’s stories move into the present, her own story ― that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book

Author: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

“Names for Light” traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism.
In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar, according to a review on goodreads.com.
While her family’s stories move into the present, her own story ― that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Updated 13 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths.

“On Pedantry” offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.

Taking readers  from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us.