Category: words

“‘These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned,’ a bearded militant in traditional Afghani two-piece clothing told residents” of Mosul in ISIS-occupied Iraq. The extremists “loaded around 2,000 books – including children’s stories, poetry, philosophy and tomes on sports, health, culture and science – into six pickup trucks. They left only Islamic texts.”

“I started looking into whether lead degrades in water, trying to find out why fisherman use lead weights and researching the composition of lead type, as I didn’t really know anything about the chemistry of it and wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to start looking for something that had rotted away.”

“Having managed to offload its online video service Blinkbox Movies to mobile operator TalkTalk, and Blinkbox Music to streaming business Guvera, Tesco has been desperately hunting for a buyer for Blinkbox Books. Last month there was much hope that Waterstones might take it over, and finally make a decisive step into the digital realm, but that bid ultimately failed.”

“People who have seen Ms. Lee more recently say that she is physically frail but completely lucid.”

“Last year 184,000 titles were produced – the equivalent of 2,870 titles per million inhabitants when population is taken into account. China and the US produced more overall titles – 444,000 and 304,912 titles respectively. However per capita, the US ranked 12th and China 25th.”

“Publishers’ resistance is fed by economic concerns, including the cost of paying translators, the elusiveness of a reliable audience, and the difficulty of mounting a publicity campaign if the author is not fluent in English.”

Jessa Crispin: “Those eager masses, now overflowing with unconditional love for a book they have not read, propelling it to No. 1 on Amazon Wednesday, will be the very people wielding pitchforks if Ms. Lee’s second book does not live up to expectations that have been building for decades.”

“When Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she didn’t think anyone would want to read a memoir by a ‘Virginia housewife.’ So she left her domestic life out of the book – and turned her surroundings into a wilderness.”

“The thing we’ve done that no one else has is match worldwide genetic populations to their languages, so that you’re looking at a comparable set, … showing that language and genes do in fact share similar geographic fault lines.”