Category: words

Emily Temple: “‘Obscenity,’ after all, is a pretty wide field. It’s obscene, the number of things I’ve called obscene. So what was it? A certain number of bad words? General sexiness? A queasy feeling in the gut by a well-connected reader? I tracked down a few answers for famous books deemed (by some) obscene. Mostly, it’s about bad words – but sometimes it’s also communism!”

Here’s the story of The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, the 1960 “sexual autobiography” of “Rey Anthony”, also known as Lillian Maxine Serett.

“Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.”

Hard to say, because the task of translating author Jin Yong’s hugely bestselling Legends of the Condor Heroes defeated many an English translator before a young Scotswoman won through with the first volume in a planned 12-volume series. “Agent Peter Buckman, who sold the rights to the series to the publisher, came across the works almost by chance as he searched the internet for’“bestselling authors’. ‘Jin Yong was in the top 10, though I’d never heard of him; nor did I read Chinese,’ he said.”

That’s right, Harry Potter (at least the first one) is now available in Scots. That was the 80th language for the first book – but two days later, it got its 81st translation, this time into Mongolian.

Beyond the Washington Post roundup, there’s the new “100 Notable Books” from The New York Times, The Guardian (UK)’s Best Books Part One and Part Two, and – for an insidery look, with books that aren’t on everyone else’s list, Publisher’s Weekly has a Top 10 and a bunch of other lists.

Nigeria has been a literary hub for many decades, but now “a new wave of thematically and stylistically diverse fiction is emerging from the country, as writers there experiment with different genres and explore controversial subjects like violence against women, polygamy and the rise of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.”

Check out Gray Zeitz and the Larkspur Press in Kentucky: “Zeitz left the University of Kentucky in the winter of 1974, half a semester away from finishing an English degree. He’d been learning letterpress work – the way individually set type makes an impression on high-quality paper –- and he wanted to make fine books, especially poetry. At that time, the letterpress craft was fading as printers moved to faster offset printing. But to Zeitz the moment seemed right. He didn’t need electricity at first, or indoor plumbing. He’d grow tobacco to sell and they’d raise calves. Kentucky writers would be featured.”

People reading one short story that was “literary” and one that was “science fiction” – identical stories except for small details like the protagonist using an airlock instead of a door – had wildly different reactions. The readers of the second kind of piece “assume the story will be less worthwhile, one that doesn’t require or reward careful reading, and so they read less attentively. This then lowers their scores on objective comprehension tests because they miss so much. Interestingly, they don’t even realise it, because they still report that the story required less effort to understand. It’s a self-fulfilling bias – except we can now show objectively that the weakness is with the reader, not the story itself.”

Basically? Americans are clueless about how reading works, so they train people badly. We need to spread more basic knowledge about how the world works, because that’s the only way to fill in the gaps that all writers leave. And we need to (this is a real surprise) fix standardized testing. “If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.”