“Is your home so filled with books that you use them as furniture/best friends/lovers?”
Category: words
Stop Condescending To Agatha Christie – She Was A Damn Genius
“Without plot, there is no reliable access to character; Christie understood this. Her characters are properly, realistically three-dimensional – which doesn’t mean what many seem to think.”
The New York Times Book Review Hires Friends Of Writers To Review Books Sometimes, But Is That OK?
“A personal connection with the author, or well-known strong feelings on the book’s subject, may actually be considered a positive, or at least not a disqualifier, Ms. Paul told me. … Landing an accomplished reviewer who will write a provocative, well-informed piece ‘is what gets us excited,’ she said.”
A Leap In Theft Of Rare Books Leads To A Rise In Book Security Forces
“The losses include volumes created hundreds of years ago, some mutilated by having single sheets brutally removed with scalpels. Tens of thousands of historic books and manuscripts are thought to be missing, according to a leading art lawyer, Chris Marinello, head of London-based company Art Recovery International.”
Inheriting A Kindle Library And Realizing The Value Of Print
“While my younger sister was going through our mother’s personal belongings, she came across something she thought I might like. ‘Do you want mum’s Kindle?’ she asked via text message. I stared at the message and thought about the irony of the endless debates I had with my mother. Now that she was gone, all I cared about were her physical books.”
We’re Losing Our Words For Outdoors Things As We Use More Words For Indoors Things
“Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for differ-ent trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious.”
Gregor Samsa Metamorphoses Into Different Creatures In Different Translations
Did he awake from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, a giant verminous bug, a gigantic cockroach, or an enormous bedbug?
How America’s Librarians Are Fighting For Our Privacy
“It’s very difficult to talk about surveillance until something happens like the Edward Snowden revelations,” said Barbara Jones, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. “A lot of people had not thought about these things, but librarians tend to be thoughtful people. People assume we’re protecting their privacy, and we have to tell them that has now been compromised. And that’s very sad.”
Crowdfunded Novel Wins The Bookseller’s First Book Of The Year Award
“The prize is intended to recognise the publisher as well as the book, and goes to both [Paul] Kingsnorth and Unbound, the crowdfunding publisher which released The Wake last year … The novel is set in 1066, and tells the story of guerrilla fighters who take up arms against the Norman invaders in the Lincolnshire fens. It is written in a reimagined version of Old English after Kingsnorth found that modern English ‘didn’t fit’ the world he was creating.”
Do We Look At Domestic Fiction Differently Based On Whether A Man Or A Woman Wrote It? Cheryl Strayed And Pankaj Mishra Weigh In
Mishra: “Novels about suburban families are more likely to be greeted as microcosmic explorations of the human condition if they are by male writers; their female counterparts are rarely allowed to transcend the category of domestic fiction.”
Strayed: “Notions of domesticity and femaleness are so entangled that many presume it’s the only thing women can write about … There’s been nary a day in the past decade that I haven’t had to set someone straight about the fact that I wrote my books for people, not women.”