Here’s another quirky, intellectual, theoretical dive into writing and communicating, in this case The Lecture.  I found this book on the shelf in Books Are Magic, my favorite neighborhood bookstore in Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn.  It was nestled with two other books from a new series entitled “Undelivered Lectures” from Transit Books publisher.  In this new initiative Transit’s goal is to introduce a new narrative nonfiction series featuring book-length essays by international and American writers.  “We want to provide an outlet for discursive prose of exceptional literary and cultural value that’s more lasting than a magazine piece but less substantial than a 300-page hardback,” said Transit publisher Adam Levy. “Undelivered Lectures is an opportunity to introduce readers to boundary-pushing works of narrative nonfiction in slim, handsome editions.”

I chose this book from the three because over the years I have given dozens (?hundreds) of lectures to medical students, residents, and colleagues and have always been interested in how to transmit information most effectively.  Cappello, a professor of English at University of Rhode Island, dives into this question with energy and style. Citing the work of Virginia Woolf, Emerson, a favorite contemporary Vermont poet Mary Ruefle, and Roland Barthes among others, she urges the lecturer to think of the work as an oral essay, a rather unstructured examination to explore a topic.  She riffs on notes taken during lectures and concludes that “I do not think of the lecture as an object, but as a type of voicing and of song whose intention is not for you to consume it, judge it, survey it, accept it or reject it, but to move with it to places un-fore-told in oneself and in the world.”

If you enjoyed that sentence, read this interesting and thought-provoking book.  If you found it a bit airy-fairy, skip this and go back to Lee Child or Harlan Coben.  .