Weekend reads: Week of June 7, 2025

Here's a collection of literary posts that we didn't share on our reader blog last week but thought were worth highlighting.

• Novels inspired by opinion polls? They're here, and they're weird (The New York Times) 

• We're close to translating animal languages — what happens then? (The Guardian)

• Semicolon use in English books has dropped dramatically, study suggests (The Guardian)

• Defending adverbs exuberantly if conditionally (Counter Craft)

• Why William Blake became a queer icon (The Guardian)

• In praise of Jane Austen's least-beloved novel, Northanger Abbey (The New Yorker)