Exploring Books Through Articles, Reviews, Announcements, & Lists 2020

2020: New year, new articles, reviews, etc.

What?

I started Exploring Books through Articles, Reviews, Announcements & Lists in 2019 with TLS, so for 2020, I'll start with articles I found interesting in the TLS for Jan. 1, 2020. TLS articles are paywalled, but selected articles in the current issue can be read w/out a subscription.

Tales of reconstruction - Some nominations for out-of-print books that deserve to be rediscovered and republished. Other than the Kipling collection I wasn't familiar with the nominations. Of particular interest for me was Stuart Kelly's piece on Mr. Never-Lost, a 1933 book from his childhood he has never been able to find in the second hand bookshops. The eponymous hero " is a strange creature, with a curved nose that reaches his feet, and which he uses to trundle around his spherical home (hence his never being lost)."

In other TLS reviews of interest: Mark Kamine on 2 books about Harvey Weinstein -- Amy Hawkins on Jonathan Chatwin's Beijing travel book Long Peace Street -- Elaine Showalter on 2 biographies of E. Nesbit, the children's author -- John J. Winters on Patti Smith's memoir of loss, Year of the Monkey -- Paul Binding's review of Echoes of the City, a recent translation from the Norwegian, the first volume of a trilogy -- and Lucasta Miller on Turgenev's Spring Torrents.

It really would help if you defined your abbreviations.

Transport Layer Security
Thread Local Storage
Toulouse, France (Airport Code)
Transparent LAN
Total Least Squares
Two Level Systems
Threaded Locking System
Translucent Liquid Sculpey
Trinity Lutheran School
Top Level Specification
Three Line Scanner
Transmission Line Speaker
Training for Learning and Serving
The Love Shack
Truck Load Services
Tiverton Library Services
The Lost Sombrero
...

Oh, and why are you talking about Jan 1, 2019?

I believe "TLS" is the official name of the publication; try clicking on the link. Thanks for the correction re date; I intended 2020 of course.

I enjoyed your thread last year, thanks for continuing!

>4 MarthaJeanne: aka (or perhaps fka) the Times Literary Supplement

Two pieces from the New Yorker:

Hua Hsu. The New Yorker, Jan 4. 2020: The Asian-American Canon Breakers. An "identity" cultural-literary movement from the early 1970s. Conflict between cultural-identity progressives of the time and writers about the immigrant experience like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan (or, for that matter, the TV series Fresh off the boat). I remember reading a bit from Aiiieeeee! when it first came out, but the movement had receded into the background by the time I got around to reading The Woman Warrior. I'm rather naive politically so the potential subversion of the progressive critique didn't occur to me & I wasn't aware of the background dialog going on at the time.

Mary Norris. The New Yorker, Jan. 2., 2020: An Instant Classic About Learning Ancient Greek. Reminds me that I have a tutorial on the topic floating around in the Cloud I never got around to.

Thanks for the feedback!

What's your top 10?

Ani Katz. The Guardian, 01/08/2020. Top 10 books about toxic masculinity.

Librarians in WWII (got this link from ALA Direct}:

Kathy Peiss. Time, Jan. 3, 2020: Why the U.S. Sent Librarians Undercover to Gather Intelligence During World War II.

This is from late last year, but I've only discovered it recently. Caution: it is very long -- old school New Yorker long -- a travel piece focusing on the recent Nobel Prize winner's controversial writing on the Bosnian war.

John Erik Riley. LitHub, 12/19/2019: Ignoble: On the Trail of Peter Handke’s Bosnian Illusions. Riley is a Norwegian writer & publisher. He is the editor of Handke-debatten, a 679 page anthology on the topic of Handke's writings on Serbia. Interesting to learn that Karl Ove Knausgard (My Struggle) was Handke's publisher and defender. Riley compares Handke to William T. Vollmann (who comes out sounding a lot better than Handke, & was a reminder to me to revisit some of Vollmann's books -- which are also pretty long).

Elizabeth Wurzel recently died age 52. Many obits & tributes. Here's one from The Atlantic:

Debora Kopaken. The Atlantic, 1/7/2020: The Glorious, Messy Life of Liz Wurtzel.

This week's TLS (Jan. 10, 2020). Paywalled, but some articles from the latest issues are free. These caught my eye:

Sean O'brien. Got rid. A non-hoarder walks us through the weeding of his book collection of titles he will never get around to reading. Not my philosophy, but to each his-her-their own.

Malise Ruthven. Finding the way: the disputed concept of Sharia. A review of two books, Understanding Sharia: Islamic Law in a Globalised World by Raficq S. Abdulla & Mohamed Keshavjee; What is Sharia? by Baudouin Dupret.

Sanam Maher. Thinly veiled: Shifting perceptions of Muslim women in the West. Review of two books: From victims to suspects: Muslim women since 9/11 by Shakira Hussein; It's Not About the Burqa: Muslim women on faith, feminism, sexuality and race Mariam Khan, editor.

Jeet Thayil. Chronicles of deaths foretold: Rereading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

Gavin Jacobson. The light of a few candles: Essays on the gothic half of post-1989 modernity. Review of My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy. Clocking in at 1K pages, this book collects the novelist's journalism. Quote: “Far from being antagonistic forces that represented Old and New India”, Roy writes, economic deregulation and religious bigotry “were actually lovers performing an elaborate ritual of seduction and coquetry that could sometimes be misread as hostility”.

Other reviews/essays of note: India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 by Richard Eaton "How Delhi’s Muslim rulers presided over a fusion of cultures and religions") -- Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania by Cristina A. Bejan (Some notable names of the period include Mircea Eliade, E. Cioran, Eugene Ionescu) -- Ten Caesars Roman emperors from Augustus to Constantine by Barry Strauss & The Origin of Empire: Rome from the republic to Hadrian by David Potter -- Two related reviews: A new translation of Doctor Zhivago and a novel about the publishing of Pasternak's novel in the West during the Cold War -- An essay on the late novels of the South African author J.M. Coetzee -- Sarah Pascoe's Sex Power Money, "... Pascoe’s personal project to learn more about the differences between male and female sexuality, is an ambitious, thoroughly researched and very funny romp through contemporary sexual politics." -- A review of Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffragette Movement by Laura Schwartz -- Two reviews of current films 1917 dir. by Sam Mendes, and Little Women dir. by Greta Gerwig.

In a posting in the previous (2019) "Exploring Books" I cited the following:

Constance Grady. Vox, Dec. 23, 2019. The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came.

However, for another perspective, a press release from a digital platform used by many public libraries:

Jan. 8, 2020: Public Libraries Reach Record-High Ebook and Audiobook Usage in 2019. Some quotes: "A record 73 public library systems in five countries loaned over 1 million digital books to readers in 2019. Achieving this unprecedented level of reader engagement: 45 city or county library systems and 28 regional or state consortiums. Eight libraries reached this million book milestone for the first time. ... Notable digital libraries for 2019 include Toronto Public Library (the number one library in the world with 6.6 million digital book loans, an all-time high for any library), Los Angeles Public Library (the number one US library for the first time with 5.9 million." Lending records across the platform (Rakuten Overdrive): "Ebooks borrowed: 211 million (+15%) ... 73 public library systems around the world (+12%) with over 1 million digital book checkouts, including 22 over 2 million checkouts, five over 3 million, four over 4 million, five over 5 million and one over 6 million. ... New public library (digital) users: 5 million (+12%)."

There's still more (lists): Top 5 audiobooks and e-books checked out from public libraries, top digital books by genre.

--Link via American Libraries Direct 1/10/20.

Two essays on the state of literary reading in 2020:

Mark Athitakis. Washington Post 1/09/2019: Reading will supposedly make you a better person. That’s not the real reason to pick up a book.

Ross Douthat. NYT 1/11/2019: The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith.

Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach), a 21st century novelist on two Victorians:

The Guardian, 01/11/2020: The House of Mirth: Jennifer Egan on Edith Wharton’s masterpiece.

And an earlier piece I missed last year:

The Guardian, 04/21/2018: Middlemarch: Jennifer Egan on how George Eliot’s unorthodox love life shaped her masterpiece.

I've read Middlemarch a couple times -- I'd read it again if I get another chance -- but Wharton has been a regrettable omission; I'm getting to her fiction only in my old age. I've recently finished The Age of Innocence & I'll bump The House of Mirth to the top of my Wharton TBR.

A translation of Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II has recently been published. Back in the day, Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird was a fictional narrative of a Jewish child caught up in the Holocaust. It's had a problematic history -- did Kosinski really write it? How much, if any, is autobiographical, and, if not, how representative are the horrific incidents? Was the author toying with his audience's prurient expectations? A film of The Painted Bird came out in 2019, and the reviewer chooses to discuss the film in the context of the fairly substantial genre of Holocaust films, though some of the original novel's issues are unavoidable as well. The reviewer teaches Comparative Literature and English at Yale.

Marta Figlerowicz. Los Angeles Review of Books, 1/10/202: Film After Auschwitz: On Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird”.

Parenting tips for readers or reading tips for parent-readers:

Liz Moore. LibHub, 01/10/2020: How to Read After Becoming a Parent: Liz Moore Suggests Practical Ways to Do the
Impossible and Find More Time.

Genre fiction:

Michael Stanley. Crimereads.com, Jan. 9, 2020: A Beginner's Guide to African Crime Fiction.

Four recent articles on science fiction from https://www.publicbooks.org/:

Eleanor Courtemanche. 1/09/2020: Internet Dystopias After Trump.

Franco Laguna Correa. 1/8/2020: Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence.

Alec Nevala-Lee. 1/07/2020: Asimov's Empire, Asimov's Wall.

John Plotz and Pu Weng. 1/06/20: To Reach the Pure Realm of the Imaginary: a Conversation with Cixin Liu.

Romance novels to thrillers:

Tanen Jones. crimereads.com, Jan. 15, 2020: Thrillers Pick Up Where Romance Leaves Off, or, What Happens After the Kiss?

The children's books librarian who didn't like Goodnight Moon ...

Dan Kois. Slate. Jan. 13, 2020: How One Librarian Tried to Squash Goodnight Moon: There’s a reason this classic is missing from the New York Public Library’s list of the 10 most-checked-out books of all time.

... or Stuart Little:

Jill Lepore. New Yorker, July 21, 2008: The Lion and the Mouse: The battle that reshaped children’s literature.

The Lepore story goes back aways so maybe paywalled, so a little background. The librarian was Anne Carroll Moore, who was the first superintendent of the New York Public Library's Department of Work with Children, even before the library opened in 1911. She oversaw the children's programs in all the branch libraries, and planned the main library's Central Children's Room; "its Children’s Room became a pint-sized paradise, with its pots of pansies and pussy willows and oak tables and coveted window seats, so low to the floor that even the shortest legs didn’t dangle." Among her many accomplishments, generally for the first time: brought in storytellers for over 200 story hours in the first year, and doubled the number in two years -- compiled a list of 2500 standard works of children's literature -- instrumental in granting borrowing privileges for children (by 1913 children's books were one third of books circulated in the branch libraries) -- celebrated the holidays of immigrants & stocked the shelves with books in French, German, Russian, & Swedish -- hired African-American author Nella Larsen to head the Children's Room in Harlem -- abolished age restrictions -- took down the Silence signs & replaced them with illustrations from children's books.

In a city of publishers, no one had more power in the failure or success of children's books publications than Moore for the 1st 50 years of the 20th century, until she locked horns with New Yorker author (recall source of the article) E.B. White & his wife Katharine. Moore supported White's project of writing the children's book Stuart Little and goaded him for 7 years to publish it. Unfortunately, she did not like the book when she finally read the galleys. "'“She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,' E. B. White remembered." Moore did her best to keep the book out of libraries, but did not succeed, though she did keep it out of consideration for a Newberry Award, the Pulitzer of kid lit. Despite her efforts, the book sold 4 million volumes by the time of the New Yorker article.

For me, the good outweighed the bad, though the Whites I'm sure would not agree.

Another children's book story:

Michelle H. Martin. The Atlantic, Jan. 16, 2020: What Captivates Children About The Snowy Day? "Ezra Jack Keats’s picture book is the most checked-out volume of all time at the New York Public Library. A professor of children’s literature examines why the book has connected with so many kids"

Alasdair Gray, Dec. 28, 1934-Dec. 29, 2019.

Julia Carmel, NYT 01/10/2019: Alasdair Gray, Scottish Author of Daring Prose, Dies at 85. He was the author of the weird fantasy novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), which I read when it was first published in the U.S. -- very impressive, with great illustrations by the author. Hard to believe it was so long ago. Hard to summarize, so this time I'll let the obit do the work: "The narrative of “Lanark” unfolds out of order — it begins with Book Three — and the focus shifts between the parallel universes of postwar Glasgow and a futuristic, hellish universe called Unthank. As the two main characters, Duncan Thaw and Lanark, explore their cities — one mundane, the other fantastical — they fixate on the mechanics of their societies and the inefficient nature of their governments. Mr. Gray’s illustrations are interspersed throughout the nearly 600-page novel, accompanied by curiously formatted sidebars and indexes."

Interesting items from this week's (Jan. 17 2020) TLS.

Featured:

Biancamaria Fontana. Power to the People. Lengthy review of the new Pleiade edition of Michelet's Histoire de la Révolution française (1847).

Samuel Earle. Visually Speaking: The new ubiquity of photographic images. Review of Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media and Kate Eichorn, The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media. "More than a trillion photographs are now taken every year – up from 80 billion in 2000 – and as the number soars, meaning and function morph as well, away from documentation, towards something more mundane and fundamental. "

Ann Kennedy Smith. Cursed with hearts and brains: Female intellectuals and muses of the twentieth century. Review of Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars, D.J. Taylor, Lost Girls: Love, war and literature 1939–1951, Mo Moulton, Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the world for women.

Samantha Ellis. She Too:
Why we should appreciate the modern Anne Brontë. (Essay) See also the Bannerjee review below.

Probably paywalled, but intriguing:

Kathryn Hughes. Trickster Term: A merry mixture of philosophy, philology and cultureM. Review of Sara Ahmed, What's the Use: On the Uses of Use. "By way of example, she points to the bird family rendering the post box unfit for its original purpose. The occupants are engaging in queer use. So, by extension, is anyone who refuses to “get used to” the way things are. This might be anyone from the trans person who dismisses the twee stick figures on public bathrooms to the students who “occupy” a university admin room after its hours of use."

Jacqueline Bannerjee. Hiding a warrior’s heart: Concealed strengths of the baby of the Brontë family. Review of Adelle Hay, Anne Bronte Reimagined: A view from the twenty-first century, Melissa Hardie, Bronte Territories: Cornwall and the unexplored maternal legacy, 1760–1860, Bella Ellis, The Vanished Bride: The Bronte Mysteries.

Clare Saxby. Thoughts about time: A Poet's Watchful Gaze on the Natural World. Review of Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing. "We begin in the West Highlands of Scotland, deep within a cave that holds the 45,000-year-old bones of a bear. From here, we travel to an Alaskan village where treasures crafted half a millennium ago are tumbling out of the tundra. Back in Scotland, we watch a Neolithic farming settlement take shape among the cattle-filled fields of Westray." Jamie is the author of other natural history essay collections: Findings and Sightlines.

Rowan Williams. Atlantic intellectual: The life of an extraordinary French scholar. Review of Florian Michel, Etienne Gilson: Une biographie intellectuelle et politique. I was introduced to Gilson's work in a college philosophy survey by a professor who never got past the Middle Ages -- not really a criticism, just so you know.

Best review title:
Annette Volfing. Beavers without testicles: The moral message of pre-modern animals. Review of Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World editor Elizabetha Morrison. An exhibition catalog of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Most blah review title:
Brian Morton. No Country for Old Whales: Melville, oceanography and uncertainty. Review of Richard J. King, Ahab's Rolling Sea: A natural history of “Moby-Dick” and Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An environmental history of the Bering Strait .

NYT 01/18/2020:

The Book That Changed My Life.

Roger Scruton, 1944-2020. A conservative gadfly in the tradition of Paul Johnson, his reviews appeared in TLS & The Spectator. Only book I've read by him was Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey which may still be in my library somewhere, uncataloged. He was very prolific (NYT obit has him at ca. 50 titles). He wrote a couple of "short introduction" type books on the philosophy greats, e.g. Kant: a very short introduction, but also on aesthetics, music, architecture, and sex. An academic, but functioned more as a public intellectual. Supported Brexit, like many British conservatives.

Alan Cowell. NYT 01/16-17/2020: Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75.

Michael Wert, author of Samurai, a concise history, is interviewed.

Sophie Roell. Five Books, 01/16/2020: The Best Books on Samurai recommended by Michael Wert.

The interview clarifies key topics about the samurai: on bushido, the so-called rules of chivalry, the myth that the samurai spent most of their time fighting, and the role of their wives (very different cultural norms regarding marriage). Werter explains why he chose these five books: Luke Roberts Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan -- Eiki Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan -- Constantine Vaporis, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan -- Teruko Craig, ed. & translator, Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai -- Mark Teeuwen & Kate Wildman Nakai, Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai.

>28 featherbear:, very interested in this subject; thanks. I read The Samurai: A New History of the Warrior Elite by Jonathan Clements not long ago and thought that was very good as a concise history.

Just finished reading this New Yorker profile -- you'll want to take a look if you like S-F or fantasy.

Raffi Katchadourian. New Yorker, 01/27/2020: N.K. Jemisin's Dream Worlds. Each novel of her Broken Earth Trilogy won a Hugo: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky. Interesting life as well.

>30 featherbear:, I read just far enough to determine spoilers lay ahead. Planning to read that trilogy this year at some point.

>30 featherbear: Thanks for sharing that. An excellent read.

> 27 I've read Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music and Our Church : a personal history of the Church of England, and found them them very interesting. But I am into music and The Anglican Communion .

Recent Atlantic on-line had some interesting book-related articles:

Alexis C. Madrigal. The Atlantic, 01/22/2020: The Way We Write History Has Changed. Because of the smartphone.

Regarding the writing or re-writing of history. Last year I did a posting on the NYT's 1619 Project (on the role of slavery in U.S. history. Here's a riposte by a historian:

Sean Wilentz. The Atlantic, 01/22/2020: A Matter of Facts: The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims.

Joe Pinsker. The Atlantic, 01/21/2020: What a Billionaire Thinks Every Kid Should Know. The 1% hedge fund manager Ray Dalio wrote a 600 page book, Principles: Life & Work -- 2 million copies sold. He has distilled his wisdom into a 167 page picture book, Principles for Success intended for readers 6 to 60. The philanthropy of wisdom I calls it.

This one has been around for a bit -- thanks to the previous posting on the recent Atlantic articles it occurs to me that this NYT article is book-related. Writing history is fraught (NYT included perhaps):

Dana Goldstein. NYT 01/12/2020: Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. "We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here’s how political divides shape what students learn about the nation’s history."

The dirt on American Dirt:*

Andre Wheeler. The Guardian, Jan. 22 2020: American Dirt: why critics are calling Oprah's book club pick exploitative and divisive.

Teo Armus. WaPo, Jan. 22 2020: ‘American Dirt’ is a novel about Mexicans by a writer who isn’t. For some, that’s a problem.

Rachelle Hampton. Slate, Jan. 21, 2020: Why Everyone’s Talking About American Dirt.

Alexander Alter. NYT, Jan. 13, 2020: Writing About the Border Crisis, Hoping to Break Down Walls. "Jeanine Cummins depicts a mother and son’s gut-wrenching journey in “American Dirt,” even as she acknowledges “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.”"?

Alex Shepherd. New Republic, Jan. 22, 2020: How Not to Write a Book Review: The fallout over "American Dirt" reveals the publishing industry's biases and blind spots.

Lauren Goff. NYT, Jan. 19, 2020: ‘American Dirt’ Plunges Readers Into the Border Crisis.

*Can I copyright the phrase?

Another crisis I've overlooked for all the wrong reasons:

Christine Larson. The Conversation, Jan. 22, 2020: If the Romance Writers of America can implode over racism, no group is safe.

Overlooked racism in a recent well-known novel:

Ayşegül Savas. Longreads, Jan. 2020: In Defense of Boris the Russki. "Ayşegül Savaş calls into question a kind of racism in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and laments the liberal reluctance to rebuke discrimination outright, regardless of its targets."

Edgar Awards nominees:

crimereads.com Jan. 22 2020: Announcing the 2020 Edgar Award Nominations.

Nomination categories: Best Novel -- Best First Novel by an American Author -- Best Paperback Original -- Best Fact Crime -- Best Critical/Biography -- Best Short Story -- Best Juvenile -- Best Young Adult -- Best Television Episode Teleplay -- Robert L. Fish Memorial Award -- The Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award -- The G.P. Putnam's Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award.

Quality rubs shoulders with marketing, those last two.

Some of the nominee lists have links to relevant articles in crimereads.

>36 featherbear:

This morning I woke up to a Tweet about just this topic.
Everyone was in an uproar over the centerpieces used during an event related to the book. You can see the centerpieces here.

Link seems to be blocked.

Yes, it doesn't seem to want to direct to the link. It's showing up as this in the URL box:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/%3Cbr%3E%0Ahttps://twitter.com/lesbrains/statu...

To check the tweet you can just delete the first part up until the https or just copy and paste the following:
https://twitter.com/lesbrains/status/1219985310777409536?s=20

The link to the tweet worked, thanks. Hilarious & sad at the same time. Are you surprised that publishers can be a little ... insulated?

On Vivian Gornick, a major influence on the personal essay:

Nora Caplan-Bricler. The Cut, Jan. 24 2020: Vivian Gornick Doesn’t Get the Hype. "The 84-year-old memoirist has a newfound audience, but she’s skeptical of their adoration."

Short article on an influential literary festival in India:

Amrit Dhillon. The Guardian, 01/25/2020: Books, Bollywood and barbs: the magic of the Jaipur literature festival "Critics may carp, but stellar lineups, celebrity sightings and swarming crowds make Jaipur the world’s biggest literary event."

More American Dirt:

David J. Schmitt. HuffPost, 01/24/2020: ‘American Dirt’ Isn’t Just Bad — Its Best Parts Are Cribbed From Latino Writers.

This article was published last month, but I overlooked it. It's a review of American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, a 2 volume set published by the Library of America:

Scott Bradfield. The New Republic, Dec. 10, 2019: Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. "... what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre."

Another interesting recommendation from the Five Books site:

Ramesh Srinivasin, interview by Sophie Roell. Five Books, 01/23/2020: The best books on Silicon Valley

Srinivasin is the author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow.

The 5 recommendations are: Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff -- Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star -- To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov -- Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn't, and How to Rewire It by Ethan Zuckerman -- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil.

E-books at the library. Recall a number of postings from last year on Macmillan's plan to limit the number of e-books a library can purchase to ... one. Here is a more colorful comment.

Caitlin McGarry. Gizmodo, 01/25/2020: Get Your EBooks From the Library, Dummy.

>47 featherbear: Nice article. Thanks for posting it!

The state of publishing:

The editors of N+1, N+1, winter 2020: Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms: Publishing in the 2010s.

Not book related, but I'm a basketball fan, and I had to share this headline from WaPo:

Japan mourns Kobe Bryant, the man who helped put Kobe beef on the global map

Addendum. Memoir of tutoring Bryant in ancient history:

Henry Gruber. N+1, 02/07/2020: I Should Have Known!

On reading literature:

Jon Baskin. The Point, 01/26/2020: On the Hatred of Literature. Catchy title; Ben Lerner is the whipping boy in this case.

Now an association item, an olden days essay (actually an excerpt from her book) by a writer I like:

Merve Emre. Boston Review, 011/27/2017: Good Reader, Bad Reader. The essay is adapted from her Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. There's more context for her thesis in this extensive book review:

Bruce Robbins. LARB, 01/21/2018: Reading Bad.

Emre teaches English at Oxford. The site The Millions has a feature called A Year in Reading. So here's herself reading in 2019:

Merve Emre. The Millions, Dec. 9, 2019: A Year in Reading: Merve Emre. I stumbled across this looking for more of her writing, and The Millions has quite a few of these if, like me, you like reading lists.

And more Boston Review pieces:

Merve Emre. Boston Review, 08/22/2017: Two Paths for the Personal Essay.

By the way, Emre is probably best known for her latest book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. An interview with the author on her book:

Merve Emre, Deborah Chasman. Boston Review, 09/19/2018: Who's Got Personality: The Myers-Briggs Bias: An Interview with Merve Emre.

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but she also did a piece on assisted reproduction that got some feedback:

Merve Emre. Boston Review, 08/14/2018: All Reproduction is Assisted. The essay has a number of responses linked to it.

See also: >88 featherbear:

I guess an occasional foray into fantasy sometimes puts me in the Bad Reader category, but I've been reading the two Witcher short story collections shortly after binging the series on Netflix. The series was better known as a video game but the video game was based on a series of Polish novels. Here's an interview posted recently:

Beth Elderkin. 01/27/2020: 'I Do Not Like Working Too Hard or Too Long': A Refreshingly Honest Talk With The Witcher's Creator. Anderzj Sapkowski quote: "Video games are simply not for me, I prefer books as entertainment." (Me too!) Two useful Witcher prequels/short story collections: The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny.

Another fantasy writer (he did a novel based on Faust) is Michael Swanwick. Here's a piece from a Good Reader site:

Sean Guynes. Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), 01/25/2020: The Matter of America: On Michael Swanwick’s “The Iron Dragon’s Mother”.

I attempted to read that article on bad readers but failed to understand what was meant by paraliterature or bad reader. Likely my poor reading comprehension makes me a bad reader.

If in reference to the Good Reader, Bad Reader article by Emre, I agree it can be abstruse. I haven't read her book, but in the excerpt, she is first contrasting Nabokov's pedagogical emphasis on close reading to bring out the work's formal, esthetic qualities, with non-formal approaches -- do I like this or that character, how does it affect me emotionally, what can we learn about the historical context and biases of the work. The latter is what Baskin is objecting to in the article from The Point. Emre's thesis is to place the non-formal approach ("bad reading") in the historical context of the post-WWII internationalization of US democratic values, though it undoubtedly served also to introduce immigrants to American democratic values via literature as well. What the excerpt leaves out, as Robbins' review claims, is that Emre doesn't really appear to be taking sides one way or the other. Close reading might be seemingly elitist (I'm sure Nabokov would not have any objection to being an elitist in the study of literature) but extra-literary approaches are complicit in the hegemony of the American empire so, uh, pick your poison.

Which came first, I wonder? When I was in college & grad school in the late 60s & early 70s I always associated the extra-literary professors with the older generation. At Columbia Steven Marcus, Dickens, From Pickwick to Dombey and Lionel Trilling Matthew Arnold, and at Yale, Maynard Mack The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope usually spent more time on the historical context rather than formalistic close reading, and I always assumed these grey eminences took their lead from the professors of their own previous generation. The touchstones of close reading like Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn and Understanding Poetry were part of the post war period & seemed like a way of liberating students new to literature from the heavy weight of historical and archival study associated with the literary scholarship of the time -- it was called New Criticism after all. IRL, at least in my experience, the two approaches managed to coexist. It's interesting that the succeeding generation of deconstructionists acknowledged their debt to the close readers of the New Criticism period, but -- dialectically? -- the suspicious approach of the deconstructionists brought forth the new historicism, gender, and ethnic studies that seem to valorize the extra-literary above all.

Follow up to >44 featherbear:, a review of Vivian Gornick's new book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

Christopher Sorrentino. Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2020: Ways of Seeing. Gornick, as already noted, is probably best-known as an author of memoirs, and her (re)-readings are exemplary of the extra-literary perspective, more memoir than literary or formalistic interpretation. This makes for an interesting review, since Sorrentino seems to be the diametric opposite, but willing to give Gornick her due:

"Gornick writes, “I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L,” and this naturalistic or realistic orientation toward fiction pretty reliably informs her response to the works under scrutiny. Gornick frequently praises books for presenting a “full range of characters to flesh out the consequences of life,” books in which there is “so much flesh-and-blood reality” that the characters are “brought to vibrant life.” Again, whether or not one agrees that this is fiction’s sine qua non is irrelevant; the book’s aim is critical mainly in its attempt to demonstrate the ways that meaning is generated by response, and Gornick certainly is convincing when she takes the perceived textual qualities of realness and life and brings them to bear on her own life, particularly in those cases where what had appeared to be real and living to the twenty-year-old Gornick is not at all what seems to the thirty- or sixty- or eighty-year-old Gornick to possess those qualities."

For Elena Ferrante fans. And another side of Merve Emre I wasn't aware of:

Sarah Chihaya & Merve Emre, interviewer Stephanie Kelley. Five Books, 01/27/2020: The Best Elena Ferrante Books.

The Neapolitan Novels have achieved great popularity, perhaps increased by the mystery of the author's identity. Emre is, as seen in >53 featherbear:, a high-powered academic, so I expect the discussion will not be the usual reading group approach. Merve Emre: "People talked about /the Quartet novels/ as if they were somehow the literary equivalents of soap operas, or a faithful transcription of the author’s life. This led us to believe that people had not done a good enough job paying attention to what we suspected was most interesting about Ferrante, which was her approach to the novel form." Emre was introduced to Ferrante's books by her mother: "I was at my parents’ house and my mother handed me My Brilliant Friend and said, “It’s about friendship. It’s not the kind of thing you would like.” " (All sorts of family dynamics here!) Like Stephanie Kelley, I haven't read the Quartet (though I have started reading My Brilliant Friend so I will put off reading the discussion until I've made more progress). Is she going to transform Bad Reading into Good Reading?

Addendum to >37 featherbear: (via Longreads):

Kelly Faircloth. Jezebel, 01/15/2020: Inside the Spectacular Implosion at the Romance Writers of America.

More "Dirt" so to speak. Publishing and marketing issues if you're from a minority. Found the link to this new online publication founded by the author Roxane Gay via Longreads.

Wendy C. Ortiz. Gay Mag, 01/29/2020: Adventures in Publishing Outside the Gates. Wendy Ortiz, her efforts to get her memoir Excavation: a memoir published. It was passed on by the major publishers, and she goes into fascinating detail as she recounts how it was finally issued & marketed (more DIY than anything else) by a small press in 2014. Then she discovers that the novel My Dark Vanessa w/blurb by Stephen King is in the pipeline for a major rollout. My Dark Vanessa seems to have disturbing similarities to her own memoir. She sees the American Dirt story being recapitulated in her situation. If you have that novel or memoir you want to see published, this is worth a read, especially if you're a minority author.

P.S. Gay Mag, which is new to me, seems to have a lot of interesting articles -- I suspect by writers who haven't gotten a lot of publicity. Check it out if you haven't visited it before.

Addendum 03/05/2020: Follow-up at >133 featherbear:

Fantasy genre posting of the day:

Dan Kois. Slate, 01/29/2020: This New Zealand Fantasy Masterpiece Needs to Be Published in America, Like, Now. Though I'm a little turned-off by the millennial-ese of the headline.

Well, then, another genre posting I guess. I found Picnic on Paradise when it first came out on a paperback rack on Chapel Street in New Haven. Liked it, but I don't know whether I ever followed up on her later novels.

B.D. McClay. New Yorker, 01/30/2020: Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No. Includes stuff about her feud -- or, better, disagreement -- with Ursula Le Guin.

From the current New Yorker. "After her suicide, in 1941, Virginia Woolf left behind a trove of letters, manuscripts, and postcards that have been acquired by the New York Public Library":

Roxana Robinson. New Yorker, 01/29/2020: Holding Virginia Woolf in Your Hands. Robinson going through the memorabilia in the NYPL Berg Collection, which recently added the William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle.

Last week's issue didn't have anything that caught my eye (I'll take another look maybe). This week, however, is coming out with The Science Fiction Issue (plus other genre topics, e.g. Sergio Leone). Mostly paywalled, I'm sure, but I'm sure a couple of articles are freebies. The online version subscription price wasn't too bad, surprisingly. The print version might be in some libraries (issue for: Jan. 31, 2020).

Keith Hopper. Start with Leone: Several Perspectives on the Spaghetti Western. Review of: Christopher Frayling, Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece (with a foreword by Quentin Tarantino!) -- Alex Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on the Italian Western -- Alessandro De Rosa, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words UK Title: In His Own Words: Ennio Morricone in Conversation.

Peter Thonemann. But What If ... : A counterfactual examination of the history of EuropeReview of: Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The failure of empire and the road to prosperity (what if another European empire replaced the Roman)

Alice Bloch. When it went Remain. Review of: William Gibson, Agency.

Alexander Leissle. In the Fright Garden: The bizarre worlds of Jeff VanderMeer. Review of VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts.

Lucy Dallas. Great Heavy Sacks of Stuff: James S. A. Corey’s convention-bending space opera. Review of: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction -- James S.A. Corey, Series: The Expanse Vols 1-8.

Lachlan McKinnon. Aesthetic Certainty: A Full Exploration of T.S. Eliot's Critical Opinions. Review of: Ronald Schuchard, ed., The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (Johns Hopkins Press, not found on LT).

Ian Thomson. Equal Dangers: A defence of Italian crime fiction.

Michael Sherborne. Alls Wells That Ends Well: The Radical Challenge of a Titan of Letters. Review of: Adam Roberts, H.G. Wells: A Literary Life -- Sarah Cole, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century -- Galya Diment, ed. H.G. Wells and All Things Russian.

Barbara Heldt. Still being red: The Russian fantasy author who is both intriguing and dated. Review of: Alexander Grin, Fandango and other stories

Pippa Goldschmidt. An eye on the skies: A very private science fiction writer. Review of Amy Binns, Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters. Wyndham is the author of, among others: Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes.

Liz Caveney. From another world: Issues of identity in modern science fiction.

Robert Irwin. Planetary picnics: Contemplating the future set out in the past. Review of, Gary K. Wolfe, ed. American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels, 1960-1966 and American Science Fiction: Four classic novels, 1968-1969. (Both in the Library of America series.

Lucy Hughes-Hallet. Voices in the dark: Fighting a complex war in Italy, during the 1940s. Review of: Caroline Moorehead, A House in the Mountains: The women who liberated Italy from fascism.

Whew!

From today's Washington Post:

Michael Dirda. To read or reread? New books are alluring, but don’t discount the value of the familiar. Column inspired by Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Thanks for catching this one. For me, different translations are a good excuse to do a bit of re-reading. Translations themselves are re-readings, so re-reading a "classic" is like a re-reading of a re-reading. For works in the original language, if you can afford it, new editions are a pretty good incentive. What goes counter to re-reading occurs when I read something for the first time which inspires me to read something related in some way, though the relationship can be determined by the next book in a series, or another book by the same author, or some other literary work alluded to in the work at hand, or a footnote or other bibliographic reference, or a counter-argument or style, or simply some obscure association item.

It was also interesting reading the comments for other perspectives on re-reading.

I thought Dirda had retired from reviewing; nice to see he's still around.

Here's something from crimereads.com that presents a lengthy overview of a prolific crime-fiction Florida-based author.

Neil Nyren. crimereads.com, 01/30/2020: Carl Hiassen: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics.

For the Florida crime milieu, my favorite author is Charles Willeford for his Hoke Mosley novels: Miami Blues & Sideswipe, but I haven't read much of his extensive oeuvre.

Two obituaries for the crime fiction author Mary Higgins Clark, 1927-2020:

Helen T. Verongos. NYT, 01/31/2020: Mary Higgins Clark, Best-Selling Queen of Suspense, Dies at 92

Emily Langer. WaPo, 01/31/2020: Mary Higgins Clark, spinner of suspenseful yarns, dies.

A nicely illustrated article picked up via AL Direct:

Georgianna Ziegler. Shakespeare and Beyond, 01/24/2020: What were women reading? A dive into the Folger vault. "Peer with me into the books left behind by women readers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What kind of books were they reading? What sort of notes did they write in them? What can we learn about their lives?"

Another article, this time from the New Yorker, on Vivian Gornick's book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, on re-reading (see >44 featherbear:, >57 featherbear:). Probably paywalled, but it's the latest issue, so should be readily available at a library near you.

Alexandra Schwartz. New Yorker. 02/03/2020: Vivian Gornick Is Re-Reading Everyone, Including Herself.

Apparently a big brouhaha on Twitter (I don't subscribe; the link is at the beginning of the article) prompts Slate to "re-print," so to speak, an essay from bygone days of yore:

Anne Fadiman. Slate, 02/04/2020: Never Do That To a Book. "SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK."

George Steiner, the eminent critic, has died.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt & William Grimes. NYT, 02/04/2020: George Steiner, Prodigious Literary Critic, Dies at 90.

Adam Gopnick. New Yorker, 02/05/2020: The Seriousness of George Steiner.

Addendum:

George Steiner in the TLS. "Heidegger and Arendt, Celan and Benjamin, Sartre and Flaubert, life and literature and death."

Addendum 2:

Kinton Ford. n+1, 02/06/2020: An Evening With George Steiner (1929–2020): A critic and his critics,

Currently reading Leo Tolstoy's Collected Shorter Fiction in the Everyman 2 v. edition & Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, so, with The Death of Ivan Ilyich in mind, this essay-review in this week's TLS caught my eye:

Caryl Emerson. TLS, 02/07/2020: Bringing Him Down: Leo Tolstoy's Art, Ideas, and Lived Life

Remembering card catalogs:

Stephen J. Greenberg. Circulating Now, 02/06/2020: Card Tricks: the Decline and Fall of a Bibliographic Tool.

Got the link via the AL Direct newsletter.

>61 featherbear: But surely the retro 'bummer' nicely balances out the 'like, now'? I see that author italicses freely, too. I noticed this because one of the italicised words was 'whelm'. Sorry, I should save my whinging for the pedants' group here--it's just that the notion of a 'fantasy masterpiece' made me cranky.

Amazon news:

David Streitfeld. NYT, 02/09/2020: In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich.

A lengthy re-examination of The Awakening:

Claire Vaye Watkins. NYT 02/05/2020: The Classic Novel That Saw Pleasure as a Path to Freedom.

Interesting reading list (can't seem to find the name of the interviewer). Not the best header for an article, by the way:

NYT, 02/06/2020: Why Gish Jen Hasn't Read One of the Most Acclaimed Books of 2019.

My morning check on Arts & Letters Daily brought up this link to a nice essay:

David Mason. Hudson Review, Winter 2020: The Durable Art of Elizabeth Bishop.

About Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse:

Kathryn Harkup. The Guardian (U.S. ed.), 02/09/2020: How Agatha Christie mystery The Pale Horse may have inspired a murderer.

Another popular author, in a New Yorker profile:

Ian Parker. New Yorker, 02/10/2020: Yuval Noah Harari Gives the Really Big Picture.

>78 featherbear:, this was particularly interesting:

You sometimes teach in China. What books about China would you recommend to a Western audience?

Qiu Xiaolong’s delightful Inspector Chen mysteries is a great place to start; his most recent book, Shanghai Redemption, will give you a sense of the tricky and ever-shifting terrain the Chinese negotiate as a matter of course. If you seek a deeper understanding, I strongly recommend Richard Nisbett’s great classic, The Geography of Thought, which puts to rest many ideas about universality once and for all. (Full disclosure: Such is my admiration, I wrote a kind of homage to Nisbett, The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap.) As for how Chinese culture is perpetuated, Lenora Chu’s candid account of her American child’s experience in an elite Chinese primary school, Little Soldiers, explains a lot even as it throws our own educational practices into relief.

Got this from ALA online newsletter Libraries Direct:

Ellen Gutoskey. 02/04/2020: New App Lets You Hear Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in Original 14th-Century English.

In >8 featherbear: above I linked to an article on Asian-American writers of the 70's. Here's a link to the current scene:

Brandon Yu. Gen, 02/11/2020: Asian American Writers Are Finally Breaking Out on Their Own Terms. Nice collection of authors to look into.

Book reviewing today. Critique of a recent book on the topic.

Peter Conrad. The Observer, 01/26/2020: Inside the Critics’ Circle by Phillipa K Chong review – rickety scaffolding. "A study of book reviewing shows little understanding of the activity."

I have a couple of additional links on file which I need to look up; later for that. Will add here if I find them.

Added: 03/16/2020:

David Gelber. Literary Review, March 2020: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field: Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times.

So there's a new memoir, In the Land of Men: A Memoir, about editing at Esquire and living with David Foster Wallace (author of the intimidatingly long novel Infinite Jest). I've only read the first few pages (of Jest) so far; seems to be about tennis?:

Zan Romanoff. LitHub, 02/10/2020: The Fraught Task of Describing Life with David Foster Wallace: Zan Romanoff on Adrienne Miller's In the Land of Men.

Laura Marsh. New Republic, 02/12/2020: Infinite Jerk: Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man.

More to come, I'm sure. Will add links at this space.

Readers of a certain age may remember the Marxist critic Louis Althusser -- for structuralist readings of Marx, or, if not that, for choking his wife to death during sex (or so he or his lawyer claimed). I liked the title, anyway. Here's a look back in anger:

Christopher Bray. The Critic, 02/2020: Inveterate ignoramus: Christopher Bray reviews History and Imperialism by Louis Althusser.

An LT touchstone link to: History and Imperialism.

Looking back on >53 featherbear: with an addendum from LARB on Good Reading:

Sumnana Roy. Los Angeles Review of Books, 02/08/2020: On Being Raised by New Critics in a Small Indian Town.

An LT touchstone link to: The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks.

Not a big fan of these "books to look forward to in the coming year" genre for not yet published books; I suspect they're really blurbs written to bypass criticism. But, since most of the recommends in this Five Books posting are by popular authors whose "latest" will be of interest to many, here's ...

Cal Flyn. FiveBooks, 02/11/2020: Editors’ Picks: Notable Novels of Early 2020. Wasn't aware that the Hilary Mantel Thomas Cromwell novels were a trilogy; anyways the 3rd one is on the way. Haven't read a one so far; the earlier volumes are sitting on my TBR shelves at the moment.

Keep in mind that Five Books is a British site, so the publishing schedule may differ in the U.S. or wherever else you are.

Also of interest. On the site's main page (for today, anyway), there are 2 reader contributed new books recommendations: Fiction 2020 and Non-Fiction 2020.

For more Five Books "reader lists": "READER LISTS Welcome to our Five Books reader lists, where readers make their own recommendations on subjects they have read a lot about.". Not sure if these are necessarily better than LT or Goodreads reader recommendations.

I am ridiculously excited for the 3rd Thomas Cromwell book. Been my most anticipated sequel for almost as long as the 2nd one's been out. It's one of those ones with the tentative publishing dates that kept getting pushed back.

For Valentine's Day: "From sea to shining sea, here’s a tour of unforgettable fiction that explores matters of the heart." Every state, its book.

Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan. NYT, 02/01/2020: 50 States of Love.

The NYPL's booklist:

Emily Temple. Literary Hub, 02/14/2020: The NYPL Was Founded 125 Years Ago: Here Are Their 125 Favorite Books Published Since Then.

Or you can go to the NYPL site: 125 Books We Love*.

*For adults.

The DCPL (District of Columbia Public Library) list of the most popular titles by black authors checked out in 2019:

Aaron Robertson. LitHub, 02/13/2020: 53 U.S. senators should go to a D.C. library and read these books by black authors.

TLS week of 02/14/2020. Articles may be paywalled.

Peter Straus. Bookends: Surveying the past and future of reading. Review of The Oxford Handbook of Publishing.

Adrian Tahourdin. Forgotten fronts: Translation prizewinners for 2019. Notes on Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth (Trans. from Hebrew Peter Applebaum) about the Russian front in 1916 -- Khaled Kalifa's Death is Hard Work (Trans. from Arabic Leri Price about life in the ongoing Syrian civil war -- Esther Kinsky's River (Trans. from German by Iain Galbraith) a Sebaldian piece by a German about life near the Lea river in East London -- Sander Kollard's Stage Four: a novel (Trans. from Dutch by Michele Hutchison) about a couple on a retirement trip retracing their 1968 journey; the husband must come to terms with his wife's fatal illness -- Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station (Trans. from Japanese by Morgan Giles) on the underside of Japanese prosperity -- Norah Lange's People in the Room (Trans. from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle) where a 17 yr old observes the activities of 3 women in Buenos Aires -- Patrick Chamoiseau’s The Old Slave and the Mastiff U.S. Title Slave Old Man (Trans. from French-Creole by Linda Coverdale) about an escaped slave.

Ann Aslanyan. Academy of intellectual scorn: The group that freed themselves by inventing rules. Review of The Penguin Book of Oulipo, The Oulipo and Modern Thought, All That is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo and others. Remember Life, a User's Manual?

Louis Amis. Free, indirect and vitriolic: The full, brutal force of male vice in Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season*. Hurricane Season is scheduled for publication in the U.S. in March 2020 by New Directions. "The story concerns a village witch, whose corpse is found floating in the river on page one: “her face had been half-eaten by some animal and it looked like the crazy bitch, the poor thing, was smiling”. The narrative channels one neighbourhood character after another, recounting their unreliable versions of who the woman was, and who did what to her – and why – along with tangential episodes of graphic, sexual violence (including bestiality and child rape). Almost every character swears and insults all the others gratuitously, flooding the free indirect narration with vitriol. Clichés are also endemic – “lost her marbles”; “chip off the old block”; “the thorn in her side” – as another form of ugliness. The novel itself is a witch’s brew, as harsh as possible by design. The ultra-long sentences and strict no-paragraphs policy mean that it has to be downed, more or less, in one shot." Must have been godawful difficult to translate (by Sophie Hughes).

Plus 2 reviews of books by or associated with William Burroughs; a review of American Dirt focusing on the book itself; books by and about John Donne.

*The U.S. edition is now published. See >210 featherbear:

Some recent items of interest on LARB:

S. Tremaine Nelson. Los Angeles Review of Books, 02/14/2020: A Gorgeous Nightmare: On Mark Z. Danielewski’s “The Little Blue Kite”. Danielewski is best known for his post-modernist horror pulp-fiction House of Leaves; Blue Kite is his new children's book.

Patricia Grisafi. 02/14/2020: Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Feminist Disability Memoir.

Tucker Coombe. 02/09/2020: Abandoning Your Religion. Review of Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church by Megan Phelps-Roper.

Ed Simon. 02/15/2020: Condemned to Salvation: Considering Universalism with David Bentley Hart. Review of That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Hart has an NYT Op Ed (01/10/2020) that is doubtless related: Why Do People Believe in Hell?. I'm currently dipping into his radical new translation (The New Testament: A Translation) which is worth a look if you're interested.

For fantasy fans,

Margaret Kingsbury. Buzzfeed News, 02/11/2020: 14 Books To Read If You're Missing "The Witcher". "Margaret Kingsbury is a writer and educator who gives daily book recommendations, says hello to birds, and has seen fairies." Cute, huh? Still, many of these titles are new to me. Recently finished Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish -- ok, worth a read. His other short story collection Sword of Destiny I'm reading but can easily put it down; suspect I won't go on to the novels. Reading another of her recommendations, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Slowly. Also re-reading Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer) which is not on Kingsbury's list.

On the Boston Review site, Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion discusses his work, in a forum with responses from Leslie Jamison, Simon Baron-Cohen, Peter Singer, and several others. Old stuff from 2014, but I think worth a look. Links to the responses come with the article.

Paul Bloom. Boston Review, 09/10/2014. Against Empathy.

According to Tom Hanks, no man has read Little Women, Jane Eyre, or Pride and Prejudice though many have claimed to have done so. Here's a review on what women look for in fiction.

Sophie Duncan. Literary Review, 02/2020: She-Readers. A review of Helen Taylor's Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives.

Reviews of the recently translated novel Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq, French godfather of incels with ties (maybe) to European populism.

Noelle Bodick. n+1, 02/14/2020: Too Disturbing: On Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin.

Andrew Marzoni. Baffler, 12/09/2019: All I Have Are Negative Thoughts.

Dwight Garner. NYT, 11/18/2019: In Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Serotonin,’ the Provocative Beat Goes On (and On).

G. Gavin Collins. Quillette, 09/19/2019: Michel Houellebecq: Populism’s Prophet.

Newbery Award winners.

Krishna Grady, interviewed by Sophie Roell. Five Books, 02/17/2020: The Best Children’s Books: The 2020 Newbery Medal and Honor Winners.

"After reading hundreds of newly published books and asking children and adults alike for their input, the winners of the 2020 Newbery Medal and Honors have been chosen. Librarian and chair of the selection committee Krishna Grady introduces us to the best new children's books that will surprise, delight and hold your kid's attention—including the first graphic novel to ever win the award."

Just realized Newbery has one "r."

Visiting a bookseller/novelist's private library:

Nina Freudenberger and Sadie Stein. LibHub, 02/18/2020: Inside the ‘Vibrant Intellectual Ecosystem’ of Larry McMurtry’s Home Library.

"McMurtry on the Few Books He Would Never Give Up."

Nice pictures.

Author Roxane Gay's reading in 2019:

Roxane Gay. Gay Mag, 02/05/2020: A Year in the Life: 2019: Roxane Gay's Year of Reading.

Movie Tie-Ins List:

Cheryl Eddy. Gizmodo, 02/18/2020: 8 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Read (or Re-Read) Before Their Adaptations Hit the Screen. Most of these are scheduled to appear on streaming platforms.

Peak TV vs/= Peak Reading:

Hannah Gersen. The Millions, 01/30/2020" Returning to Books After Climbing Peak TV.

I can empathize, though I'm sometimes more Junk TV vs/= Junk Reading.

Nebula Awards Finalists:

Nebula Awards Page.

Buzzfeed Bookshelves:

Christopher Hudspeth, Buzzfeed, 02/15/2020: Book Nook Shelf Inserts Are Really Cool.

Julie Gerstein. Buzzfeed, 02/04/2017: 24 Pieces Of Bookshelf Porn That Are Borderline NSFW.

Michelle Regna. Buzzfeed, 12/02/2018: 16 Beautiful Bookshelves Guaranteed To Give You Serious Envy.

Delaney Strunk. Buzzfeed, 03/02/2018: 17 Home Libraries That Look Like Something Out Of A Fairytale.

Bless you, Instagram.

Literary trivia (with thanks to AL Direct):

Kelly Jensen. Book Riot, 2/24/2020: 125 Literary Jeopardy Answers to Test Your Bookish Trivia. This is a weird gameshow where the "answer" is a question. Go figure.

Teddy Wayne: "Nearly every month since April 2013, first for Salon and for the last two years Lit Hub, I have asked a group of writers with new books out the same seven questions. They all originated from the first authors I interviewed—Allison Amend, Amy Brill, Jennifer Gilmore, and Fiona Maazel—whom I asked to come up with questions veering from the standard ones writers get (“Where do you get your ideas from?” “Where do you like to write?”) that invite clichéd responses. I liked their questions (and answers) enough to use them for each subsequent set of interviews."

LitHub, 02/25/2020: What I’ve Learned Interviewing Almost 300 Writers Over Seven Years.

For some reason, The Atlantic has been fixated recently on fan fiction:

Shannon Chamberlain. The Atlantic, 02/14/2020: Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today.

Kaitlyn Tiffany. The Atlantic, 02/19/2020: How to Murder Harry Potter. "In “deathfic,” writers of fan fiction find unexpected comfort in killing off their favorite popular characters."

And going back aways:

Julie Beck. The Atlantic, Oct. 19, 2019: What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t. "Everyone leaves feedback and reviews for one another, leading to a sprawling, communal learning environment. ... Everyone leaves feedback and reviews for one another, leading to a sprawling, communal learning environment."

"Prayer and poetry are defined by being words that gesture beyond words themselves."

Ed Simon. The Millions, 02/28/2020: Poetry Is Prayer.

Found this link on longreads.com:

Sari Botton. The Cut, 02/26/2020: Replaying My Shame. "Emily Gould reconsiders the likelihood of women's first-person writing bringing about change." Also, it's about Gawker.

Some articles that caught my eye in this week's TLS:

David E. Cooper. TLS, 02/28/2020: The ways of dog to Mann. Review article of On Dogs: An Anthology (edited by Tracey Ullman) -- Mark Alizart, Dogs: A philosophical guide to our best friends -- Vita Sacville-West, Faces: Profiles of Dogs. The latter book has photos of Thomas Mann and Milan Kundera with their dogs, hence the pun-ny title.

Elizabeth Dearnley. TLS, 02/28/2020: What’s new pussycat? The kinship between the feline and the feminine. Review of Kristen J. Sollée, Cat Call: Reclaiming the Feral Feminine.

Hal Jensen. TLS etc.: Fantasy engines: What does it feel like to know something?. Review of: Steven Connor, The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance, and fantasies of knowing. This one's under paywall plus it's not entirely positive, but here's a section on a chapter the reviewer really liked:

"How welcome, then, is Chapter Seven! Here, Connor takes a quick tour around the buildings and institutional structures of the academic world, drawing our attention to the objects and systems designed to house our fantasies of knowledge. The appearance here of solid, vibrant, individual things is both a relief and a thought-provoking pleasure. Libraries, schools, quadrangles and the scholar’s study are portrayed as stage sets for the theatre of our fantasies of knowledge. There is a marvellously imaginative and sharp-eyed inspection of the composition, and homely furnishings, of Antonello da Messina’s “St Jerome in his Study”. Briefly, but effectively, Connor charts the transformation of the university from an overtly physical place of preservation to today’s disembedded “means of passage” whose reality is ever more virtual. I only wish he had had more space (or indeed written a different book) so he could expand on ideas about the groves of academe and ivory towers, fields of research and the spatial implications of “graduates” and “degrees”. In a memorable flight of fancy, he suggests that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could only have been written from within the enclosed quadrangles and “peephole gates in castellated exterior walls” of Oxford rather than the open spaces and large three-sided courts of Cambridge."

Plus: An excerpt from Hilary Mantel's new concluding book on Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror & The Light -- A review of 2 books on Houdini (one of them a biography); everything you thought you knew was wrong! Adam Begley, Houdini: The Elusive American (not yet published in the US), Joe Posnanski The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini -- A review of a gossipy memoir about the historian J.H. Plumb, Sir John Plumb: The hidden life of a great historian -- A review of Abby Chava Stein, Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman -- Four separate review articles of books about the Holocaust -- A review of a new travel book by Paul Theroux, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Road Trip (he drives along the US/Mexican border, then does a roadtrip through Mexico itself).

This is probably legislative showboating, but for what it's worth:

Nicole Cook. The Conversation, 02/28/2020: Librarians could be jailed and fined under a proposed censorship law.

Isn't someone trying this in Tennessee as well?

Addenda:

Yup,

Lucas Thompson. nbcnews.com, 02/27/2020: 'Drag Race' stars slam Republican attempts to ban drag queen library events. "Lawmakers in Missouri and Tennessee have introduced bills that could put librarians in prison for hosting Drag Queen Story Hour events at public libraries."

WBIR.com, 02/20/2020: Library officials weigh in on proposed "Parental Oversight Bill".

And let's not forget:

Alexis Reliford. Refinery29, 02/09/2020: RuPaul Reads The Children’s Library For Filth On SNL

An interview with SF author Jeff VanderMeer.

Ryan F. Mandelbaum. Gizmodo/iO9, 02/28/2020: Annihilation Author Jeff VanderMeer Tells Us How He Makes His Sci-Fi Feel Authentic.

Just what we need! Best SF books about humanity-annihilating plagues:

Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Lavie Tidhar. WaPo, 02/28/2020: Coronavirus feels like something out of a sci-fi novel. Here’s how writers have imagined similar scenarios.

Addendum, 03/10/2020:

Tobias Carroll. Vulture, 03/10/2020: Pandemics: An Essential Reading List.

This is a long bibliographic essay on the literature of epidemics:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 03/12/2020: On Pandemics and Literature. I didn't know Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) had also written a precursor to the pandemic novel, The Last Man.

Addendum, 03/18/2020:

Follow up to the On Pandemics essay:

Ed Simon. The Millions, 03/18/2020: Letter from the Pestilence. Since this essay references Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon, George Scialabba's recent essay might be worth a peek. N+1, 03/09/2020: Tips for the Depressed. Excerpt from How to be Depressed (not to be confused with the book by Dana Eagle) coming out sometime in March.

See also: >151 featherbear:

Economic theory in children's books:

Rebecca Christie. Slate, 02/28/2020: How a Classic Children’s Book Got Hijacked by the Culture Wars. The book in question is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

On the Rosewater Trilogy:

Jessica FitzPatrick. Los Angeles Review of Books, 02/29/2020: Seeds of Catastrophe: “The Rosewater Insurrection” and “The Rosewater Redemption”.

Touchstone links: Rosewater, The Rosewater Insurrection, The Rosewater Redemption

James McBride is the author of two books I've read and liked: The Good Lord Bird and Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. His new book is Deacon King Kong. Here is an interview & a book review:

Seija Rankin. Entertainment Weekly, 02/26/2020: James McBride on his literary heroes and the books he wishes he'd written. If you're a fan, you'll find this interesting.

Jonathan Dee. New Yorker, 02/24/2020: Fate and Fury in James McBride's "Deacon King Kong."

More about e-books, libraries, & publishers:

Caitlin McGarry. Gizmodo, 03/02/2020: Libraries Could Preserve Ebooks Forever, But Greedy Publishers Won’t Let Them.

A quote therefrom:

“You think about Harvard Library or New York Public Library—these big systems that, in addition to lending out stuff for people to use, are also the places where we look to preserve our heritage forever,” said Alan Inouye, the American Library Association’s senior director of public policy and government relations. “You can’t do that if it’s a two-year license.”

The header might be misleading. E-books are leased via intermediaries, e.g. OverDrive. It is unlikely that Harvard would purchase the print versions of the entire Overdrive catalog, and their selectors would purchase print versions of e-books they consider worth preserving.

An Indonesian author on travel writing:

Intan Paramaditha. LibHub, 03/02/2020: On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel. Travel & exclusion.

So I've gotten around to reading Edith Wharton late in life, The Age of Innocence to be precise, and here's an introduction to a new Penguin edition of that novel:

Sarah Blackwood. LibHub, 03/03/2020: What Do We Do with The Age of Innocence in 2020?.

Review of a book I'd like to read, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire, on the basis of other books by William Dalrymple on India. As a bonus, a list of other recommended books on India is in the sidebar. The book was also reviewed in TLS.

Priya Satiya. LARB, 03/03/2020: An Epic Struggle for Mastery of a Subcontinent.

A recent essay/posting & appreciation of Octavia Butler's Kindred.

Kat Solomon. Ploughshares, 02/07/2020: Reckoning with the Past in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

With The Mirror and the Light set for release March 10, here's the inevitable "in conjunction" profile:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 02/24/2020: For Hilary Mantel, There’s No Time Like the Past.

British Library has a new site for children's literature:

BL Press Release, 02/21/2020: The British Library brings together 100 treasures from children’s literature for the first time, in a new free-to-access website.

The site itself: Discovering Children's Books.

American presidents as writers:

James Parker. The Atlantic, 02/13/2020: Three Authentic Writers Have Occupied the Oval Office: On the literary merits of presidential writing. Review of: Craig Fehrman, Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote.

"Our critic James Parker narrows the list of 45 down to three “authentically muddy-eyed and pained-by-subjectivity writers.”"

SPOILER ALERT: Fehrman only goes as far as Obama, so no evaluation of Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Apartment Guide's best cities for booklovers in the U.S.:

Michael Hochman. apartmentguide.com blog, 01/24/2020: The Best Cities for Booklovers. Top 10 from Birmingham, AL to Cambridge MA.

Surprised to learn that J. Edgar Hoover began his government career at the Library of Congress:

Alana Mohamed. LibHub, 03/04/2020: How J. Edgar Hoover Used the Power of Libraries for Evil.

"While librarians are often cheered for democratizing knowledge, controlling information is the underlying tenet of the profession—which is partially why the profession today is largely categorized within information sciences."

Useful archival imagery, freed of copyright:

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Free Images for Broader Public Use.

Link to the website itself: Smithsonian Open Access.

I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky's translation of Doctor Zhivago and it seemed to lack flow as an English rendering (I assume it was literally accurate). As a reader who was introduced to Russian literature by Constance Garnett & David Magarshak, the P/V's seemed to plod. So there's a new translation to tempt me to give the novel another chance.

Christine Jacobson. LARB, 03/05/2020: Giving “Doctor Zhivago” Another Chance.

I haven't succumbed to audiobooks just yet, but here's an interesting background story on Lucy Ellmann's well-reviewed long sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport's audiobook creation.

Laura Snapes. The Guardian, 02/28/2020: ‘Surreal immediacy’: how a 1,000-page novel became a 45-hour audiobook.

Publishers who specialize in high-end coffee table books:

Matthew Schneier. The Cut, 03/06/2020: Judged By Their Covers: How the Assoulines made their name on books to be seen (and occasionally read).

Oprah's Book Club drops My Dark Vanessa (by Kate Elizabeth Russell) due to "controversy."

Jessie Gaynor. LitHub, 03/05/2020: Oprah’s Book Club drops My Dark Vanessa as a pick because of Twitter controversy.

Repercussions of Wendy Ortiz's article on her claim that My Dark Vanessa plagiarized her memoir. See >60 featherbear:

Gaynor: "Briefly, the My Dark Vanessa “controversy” began when Wendy Ortiz—who admitted that she had not read the book—claimed that she had been told by people who had read it that there were elements of the novel that closely resembled Ortiz’s own memoir. Ortiz wrote an essay about My Dark Vanessa and her own experience with the publishing industry on Gay Magazine, and while the essay makes valid points about the publishing industry’s gatekeeping, the (vague) accusations against My Dark Vanessa, which appear to be the source of Oprah’s Book Club’s trepidation, appear unsubstantiated. (To be fair, it’s tough to substantiate a vague accusation when you “have no interest” in reading the book in question.)"

Addendum:

Constance Grady. Vox, 03/06/2020: Reading Lolita in the wake of the My Dark Vanessa controversy.

This week's TLS (03/06/2020):

Featured articles that might be interesting (probably not paywalled):

Irina Dumitrescu: How to write well: Rules, style and the ‘well-made sentence’. Review of: John Warner, Why They Can't Write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities -- Trish Hall, Writing to Persuade: How to bring people over to your side -- Amitava Kumar, Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style -- Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence: The elements of reading, writing … and life -- Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and pattern in narrative.

Jonathan Benthall: Tolerance and the godly: Approaching religious divides. Review of: Tahir Abbas, Islamophobia and Radicalisation: A Vicious Cycle -- Selina O'Grady, In the Name of God: A history of Christian and Muslim intolerance -- Hasan Suroor, Who Killed Liberal Islam? -- Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, empire, and the challenge of solidarity.

No doubt paywalled, but check your local library:

Kory Stamper: Arch fiends in Paradise: What happens when lexicographers fight. Review of: Peter Martin, The Dictionary Wars: The American fight over the English language. The rivalry between Noah Webster and Joseph E. Worcester. How American English broke away from British English. Apparently Webster was not the nicest personality.

Sam Leith: Cloud of unknowing: What’s the point of book reviews? Phillipa K. Chong, Inside the Critics' Circle: Book reviewing in uncertain times.

Edmund Gordon: Gangsters’ paradise: Hilary Mantel’s final Thomas Cromwell novel is a prodigious feat full of violence, savagery and ghosts. Review, of course, of The Mirror & the Light.

Bryan W. Van Norden: Taking non-Western philosophy seriously. Review of Roel Sterckx, Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding. A big, 512 p. tome from Princeton Univ. Press.

Diane Purkiss: Bodies of condensed cloud: Transformation and the search for identity. Review of: John B. Kachuba, Shapeshifters: a history -- Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.

Caroline Eden: Survive and thrive: The art of living in a hard place. Review of Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara. Sanmao is the pen-name of Chen Mao Ping. She married a Spanish engineer and they lived in the Western Sahara (I believe in the late 60's or early 70's). "Her accounts of their everyday life there, in which the threat of war looms as Morocco and Mauritania begin to tussle for control of the region, captivated readers when her memoir was first published in 1976. It is now available in a riveting English translation by Mike Fu."

Plus: an essay on Mansfield Park -- a review of Venus & Aphrodite: History of a Goddess -- reviews of the new movies The Invisible Man (the Elizabeth Moss version) & Portrait of a Lady on Fire -- Sounds & Furies: The love–hate relationship between women and slang -- the environmental novel by Jenny Ofill, Weather. And more ...

Technique for crime fiction writers:

John McMahon. crimereads.com, 03/06/2020: The Art of Letting Your Heroes Get Beat Up Now and Again.

News about the new memoir by Woody Allen. Appears Hachette won't publish it after all, because Ronan Farrow.

John Williams. NYT, 03/06/2020: Hachette Says It Won’t Publish Woody Allen’s Book.

"The new documentary “The Booksellers” looks at the esoteric world of the antiquarian trade, and the passionate, eclectic and endangered characters who make it hum."

Jennifer Schuessler. NYT, 03/05/2020: Peeking Into the World of Rare Books.

Oprah and guests discuss American Dirt on Apple TV:

Ron Charles. WaPo, 03/06/2020: Oprah refused to cancel her ‘American Dirt’ show — and reminded us what civil discourse looks like.

Association item: >136 featherbear:

Just finished reading an article about German exiles in Los Angeles in the 40's, that to me serves as an excellent bibliographical essay:

Alex Ross. New Yorker, 03/02/2020: Exodus: the haunted idyll of exiled German novelists in wartime Los Angeles. He's well aware of the anti-immigrant context in the U.S., incidentally.

Some interesting mentions include: Anna Seghers, Transit -- Donna Rifkind, The Sun and her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers -- Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus, Germany and the Germans -- Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh ("the first great fictional rendering of the psychology of genocide") -- Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann's War -- Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann der Amerikaner -- Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Just discovered Constance Grady's weekly column on books in Vox. I'll try and use this to economize on my LT postings, since she has the similar practice of linking to current book talk:

Constance Grady. Vox, 03/07/2020: Pete Buttigieg’s favorite author would maybe hate Pete Buttigieg: And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects.

Constance Grady. Vox, 02/27/2020: How to read a very long book And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects.

So here's a long review of the new Brian Greene book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Spoiler alert: Doesn't appear to be there is any Meaning to be found, so you can wait for the paperback. The reviewer is Dennis Overbye, who is the NYT "cosmic affairs" correspondent, and author of a book I recall as being quite good, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.

Dennis Overbye. NYT, 02/17-03/04/2020: Just a Few Billion Years Left to Go. It appears I missed the review when it came out in February.

"It is also occasionally afflicted with stretches of prose that seem as if eternity will come before you ever get through them, especially when Greene is discussing challenging topics like entropy. If I really understood entropy, I suspect I would be writing this review in an office at M.I.T., not an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side."

Personally, I'd take the apartment on the Upper West Side if I could afford it.

Graphic novels. Eat your spinach!!

Karen W. Gavigan, Kasey Garrison. The Conversation, 03/10/2020: Graphic novels help teens learn about racism, climate change and social justice – here’s a reading list. Gavigan is a "professor of library and information science." Of course. See >128 featherbear:

The literature of last meals:

Jay Rayner. NYT, 03/10/2020: Last Meals on Death Row, a Peculiarly American Fascination. "Researching his book on final-menu fantasies, the critic Jay Rayner came across an unsettling body of work about the choices of the condemned."

Touchstone link: Jay Rayner’s Last Supper: One Meal, A Lifetime In The Making. Appears the U.S. title is: My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making.

On the topic of last meals, I liked this restaurant review from WaPo (completely unrelated to bibliographic themes):

Tim Carman. WaPo, 03/10/2020: Wooboi, that’s a hot (and tasty) chicken sandwich. Sounds like "code blue" could combine the last meal with the death penalty.

Odds & ends pulled from AL Direct newsletter:

Michael Kozlowski. GoodEreader, 03/10/2020: Macmillan is thinking about scrapping their library embargo.

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 03/06/2020: No more 'nagging wives': how Oxford Dictionaries is cleaning up sexist language.

New on the Five Books site:

Thomas Piketty, interviewer Edouard Mathieu. fivebooks.com, 03/10/2020: The best books on Historical Change and Economic Ideology.

Piketty's best known for Capital in the Twenty-First Century. His new book is Capital and Ideology

The interview gives fuller information about: Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property -- Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction -- Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 -- Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India -- Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950.

True-crime links from Longreads. Articles, not books, but still:

Catherine Cusik. Longreads, 03/11/2020: 15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them.

"While so many of the most complex cases are cut short by bureaucratic limits, the best true crime reporting attempts to slow us down long enough to consider unique regional factors, historical context, human rights, and our own evolving biases."

Profile of Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven. Might be paywalled.

Hillary Kelly. Vulture, 03/12/2020: The Disaster Artist Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is speaking to our pandemic-frenzied moment. Her new book is even bleaker.

The new book is The Glass Hotel, scheduled for publication March 24. Has nothing to do with pandemics, if I understand correctly.

From the latest issue of TLS (03/13/2020):

Frances Wilson. TLS, 03/13/2020: Reverse of the medal: The posthumous reputation of Patrick O’Brian. Review of the second volume of Nikolai Tolstoy's biography of his stepfather, Patrick O'Brian: A Very Private Life. A very troubled life indeed, but no reason not to read the novels, I should think, though I'm not sure where the reviewer stands. The first volume is Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist.

Isaac Nowell: Letters from heaven: Various meanings of winter. Review of Bernd Brunner, Winterlust: Finding beauty in the fiercest season. "The author works deftly through history, anthropology, nature writing, anecdote and quotation, and even makes forays into literary criticism."

Ben Hutchinson: The rest is silence: On George Steiner, 1929–2020 (Essay).

T.M. Luhrmann: Grandmothers of civilization: How the menopause contributes to our success as a species. Review of: The Slow Moon Climbs: The science, history, and meaning of menopause.

Kate Womersley: Death as a day job: Medicine for when the fight stops. Review of Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A doctor’s story of love and loss. A doctor's journey: from TV journalist, to medic, to hospice support staff. Her much admired father, a GP, comes down with bowel cancer. Sounds like the book has much in common with a book I read & admired recently, Atul Gawande's Being Mortal.

Plus: William Boyd in Tokyo -- Georg Trakl, translator, Will Stone, Surrender To Night: Collected poems of Georg Trakl -- Richard M. Berrong, Pierre Loti -- a 2 volume Pleiade edition of George Sand's novels -- Joan Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia -- Szilárd Borbély, translator, Ottilie Mulzet Final Matters: Selected poems, 2004–2010 -- Palestine 100, a collection of SF stories by various authors imagining a future Palestinian state -- Ibtisam Azim, The Book of Disappearance, which sounds like a Palestinian novel modeled on the fiction of Salman Rushdie. And much more.

Last night I was notified on the city (New Haven CT) telephone tree that the public libraries would be closed indefinitely due to the pandemic. I wonder if social distancing has been applied to libraries in other cities and locales? US libraries often have access to e-books, but as noted in earlier postings, the publishers have all sorts of restrictions. Hopefully use of the Internet won't need to be rationed.

Another library closing:

Jennifer Scheussler. NYT, 03/14/2020: At the Library, Last Call for Beauty and Books.

"As the New York Public Library’s magnificent 42nd Street reading room prepared to close temporarily because of the virus, regulars wondered when they would be back."

So right now lists of things to read are proliferating like you know what (see >115 featherbear:). Here's a couple from The Guardian:

Lois Beckett. The Guardian, 03/16/2020: A dystopian reading list: books to enjoy while in quarantine.

Guardian Readers. 03/13/2020: Your coronavirus reading list: reader suggestions to bring joy in difficult times"

"Speculative fiction" recommendations from the 5 Books website. New authors to me; selected and described by Ken Liu, author of The Paper Menagerie and a new collection of stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

Ken Liu, interviewed by Cal Flyn. Five Books, 03/16/2020: The Best of Speculative Fiction, recommended by Ken Liu.

The books: Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby -- Peter Tieryas, United States of Japan -- Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day -- S.L. Huang, Zero Sum Game -- Amal el Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

>151 featherbear:

The HTML to your link for the Guardian Readers article is jumbled and needs revision.

Fixed. Thanks & be safe.

"Publishers, bookstores and authors are struggling to confront and limit the financial fallout from the unfolding coronavirus crisis.":

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 03/16/2020: The World of Books Braces for a Newly Ominous Future.

Book review of a memoir by Greta Thunberg's mother.

Zibby Owens. WaPo, 03/16/2020: Greta Thunberg’s family memoir sends an urgent message to us all, especially moms.

Reading Albert Camus' The Plague in Korea.

Colin Marshall. Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, 03/08/2020: Reading Albert Camus’s The Plague in the Time of the Coronavirus.

The American Library Association official recommendation:

ALA Executive Board Recommends Closing Libraries to Public.

"Trying to maintain social distance while not losing your mind from boredom? Your public library’s collection of ebooks is an excellent resource, and now you have an even larger selection: One of the Big Five U.S. publishers walked back its 8-week delay on licensing new ebook releases to libraries."

Caitlin McGarry. Gizmodo, 03/17/2020: Major Book Publisher Abandons Terrible Plan to Keep New Ebooks Out of Libraries.

Noble, generous, self-sacrificing Macmillan announcement.

Silver lining department:

Germain Lussier. Gizmodo, 03/17/2020: On the Plus Side, Maybe George R.R. Martin Will Finish Winds of Winter Now.

Addendum:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 03/18/2020: 'I feel fine': George RR Martin reassures fans from self-isolation.

"Ling Ma’s 2018 book Severance about a fictional virus that spreads across the globe has stark parallels to the spread of the coronavirus, and could be instructive for what we ought to take away from living during a pandemic"

Jane Hu. The Ringer, 03/18/2020: ‘Severance’ Is the Novel of Our Current Moment—but Not for the Reasons You Think.

I've been prioritizing e-books over print books for some time, due to space considerations -- small apartment. I like using the Kindle app on my tablet, especially with my aging eyes. Here's another reason to try e-books if your TBR holdings are dwindling faster than expected.

Rachelle Hampton. Slate, 03/17/2020: Amazon Is Putting Book Deliveries Into the Slow Lane Thanks to the Coronavirus.

"The retail giant is prioritizing household and medical supplies, and pushing everything else to the back of the queue." Hopefully coffee filters are household supplies.

Will independent bookstores adjust to the pandemic?:

Jenny Gross. NYT, 03/17-18/2020: Curbside Pickup. Bicycle Deliveries. Virtual Book Discussions. Amid Virus, Bookstores Get Creative. "“We’re going to operate like a pizza takeout place,” one independent bookstore owner said."

Corinne Segal. LitHub, 03/18/2020: Bookshop.org to share 30 percent of each purchase with bookstores impacted by coronavirus shutdowns.

Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed News, 03/18/2020: How To Help Your Favorite Bookstore During The Coronavirus Epidemic.

Addenda, 03/18/2020:

More Amazon stories:

David Streitfeld. NYT, 06/23/2019: What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues.

David Streitfeld. NYT, 08/19/2020: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite. "As fake and illegitimate texts proliferate online, books are becoming a form of misinformation. The author of “1984” would not be surprised."

See >166 featherbear: for more Amazon notes.

Formalism in literary interpretation:

Victoria Baena. Los Angeles Review of Books, 03/15/2020: Institution Building: On Anna Kornbluh’s “The Order of Forms.”

"“I don’t know anything. I know I’m in the right, but I don’t know anything. If I had known dates, and places, and facts … I could have made him see. … But I don’t know enough about it.” She’s done the reading. But despite her preparedness, when faced with a mansplainer who’s wrong, the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night. Hale and Hale’s women—the sad and the bored and the frustrated (and the painfully sharp), those defying the men in their lives and those resisting the fascism rising around the world—firmly belong in our own time."

Maya Chung. Public Books, 03/17/2020: Nancy Hale, At Last.

Long review of a new Library of America publication, Where the Light Falls, selected short stories of Nancy Hale, edited by Lauren Groff.

Chung appears to be a fellow Columbia alum. Don't really regret CC (guys only in those days), though it was kind of a slog, but I'm your average mansplainer.

Review of the latest woke book:

Stephen Rohde. Los Angeles Review of Books, 03/17/2020: A Failed Case Against Free Speech.

Review of: P.E. Moskowitz, The Case Against Free Speech: The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent.

A couple of concrete Free Speech examples:

David Streitfeld. NYT, 03/17/2020: Amazon Bans, Then Reinstates, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’. "The retailer is trying to do two contradictory things: Ban hate literature but allow free speech."

And the earlier article:

David Streitfeld. NYT, 02/09/2020: In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich. "The retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it has banished objectionable volumes — and agreed to erasing the swastikas from a photo book about a Nazi takeover."

See also David Streitfeld's other stories on Amazon at >162 featherbear:

Comfort books:

Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan. NYT, 03/18/2020: Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett, Min Jin Lee and Others on the Books That Bring Them Comfort.

Lots of recommendations, some off the wall.

Addendum.

Another comfort book recommendation:

Emily Todd VanDerWerff. Vox, 03/18/2020: The grim, necessary optimism of sci-fi author Becky Chambers. "Her novels and novella dare to imagine a hopeful future for humanity. They’re exhilarating."

Epidemics in classic Victorian novels:

Amy Davidson Sorkin. New Yorker, 03/20/2020: The Fever Room: Epidemics and Social Distancing in “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre”.

The Guardian's list of best recent crime novels:

Laura Wilson. The Guardian, 03/20/2020: The best recent crime novels – review roundup.

An interview with the director of The Booksellers, a documentary on the antiquarian book trade:

John Maher interviewing D.W. Young: The Millions, 03/20/2020: Breathing New Life into Old Books.

"Books are constantly being made into movies, but rarely is a movie actually about books—let alone the people who sell them. Earlier this month, The Booksellers, a documentary on the antiquarian book trade and the buyers and sellers of rare books, hit theaters to overall acclaim, and while the film is very much about its characters, it’s also about the trade as a whole, and how it’s surviving in an era of dizzying technological advancement."

TLS, current issue, 03/20/2020. Items that caught my interest. Some articles may be paywalled if you don't have a subscription:

Tim Parks. Milan in a time of coronavirus: A dispatch from northern Italy.

Nicholson Baker. Bernice bobs her hair: What were people reading and talking about a hundred years ago?.

Russell Davies. Under the skin: George Gershwin, then and now. Review of: Richard Crawford, Summertime: George Gershwin's Life in Music -- Anna Harwell Celenza, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin.

Carol J. Oja. Shuffling along: Music, segregation and African American newspapers.

Lucasta Miller. Light waves of words, ugly facts: Looking the slimy and intolerable in the eye in Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. Review of: Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood -- Youth -- Dependency.

Jade French. Famously unknown: Recalling Djuna Barnes, a modernist mover and shaker. Review of: Elizabeth Pender & Cathryn Setz, Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. Edge of the miraculous: Lessons from a lifetime of travel. Review of: Barry Lopez, Horizon.

Ian Ground. ‘I’s before ‘E’s: A post-representationalist account of experience: 4E Cognition. Review of: Albert Newen et al., editors The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. I'm fascinated by this article though I don't understand it (yet -- hope springs eternal).

Joanna Pocock. Beautiful even as it burns: Battling against destruction in the American West. Review of: Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing.

Tom Lathan. Through the dark water: A marine scientist’s love letter to a vanishing world. Review of: Callum Roberts, Reef Life: An Underwater Memoir.

Thomas Small. Humanity within the blast" The aetiology of the suicide bomber, a form of violent martyrdom. Review of: Iain Overton, The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age.

Winners of the Windham Campbell literary prize:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 03/19/2020: Eight authors share $1m prize as writers face coronavirus uncertainty.

Jessica Alice. The Guardian, 03/19/2020: Interview: Maria Tumarkin on winning the 2020 Windham Campbell: 'It feels like a complicated gift'

LitHub creates a Virtual Book Channel:

Jonny Diamond. 03/20/2020: Literary Hub Presents: The Virtual Book Channel.

The initial program:

03/20/2020: Shelter in Place: Kevin Nguyen, Live From His Kitchen.

Woody Allen finds a publisher:

Alexandra Alter and John Williams. NYT, 03/23/2020: Woody Allen’s Memoir Is Published.

"The American Library Association’s Executive Board announced March 24 that the 2020 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition scheduled for June 25–30 in Chicago has been canceled ..."

American Libraries, 03/24/2020: ALA Cancels 2020 Annual Conference. "For the first time in 75 years, ALA cancels annual gathering."

Terrence McNally, the playwright, died 03/24/2020.

Jesse Green and Neil Genzlinger. NYT, 04/24/2020: Terrence McNally, Tony-Winning playwright of Gay Life, Dies at 81.

"Mr. McNally, who died of coronavirus complications, introduced audiences to characters and situations that most mainstream theater had previously shunted into comic asides."

A "Five Books" take from LitHub:

Kawai Strong Washburn, interv. by Jane Ciabattari. LitHub, 03/24/2020: Five Great Books on Hawai’i.

"Kawai Strong Washburn, the author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors, shares five books in his life."

Touchstone links: Kristiana Kahakauwila, This is Paradise -- Lois Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers -- Hokulani Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Cruz, editors, Detours: A decolonial guide to Hawai’i -- Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues -- Samuel M. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawai’i

Addendum. The "summary" on the LT page is for another book. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is about the Hawaiian diaspora after the collapse of the sugar industry. Check out the summary on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Or the review below:

Imbolo Mbue. NYT, 03/30/2020: The Hawaii of ‘Sharks in the Time of Saviors’ Is Modern, Yet Mystical.

The nuts and bolts of the writer's trade:

John Maher. The Millions, 03/25/2020: How to Live the Writing Life.

"Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer, the two most recent editors of Poets & Writers, want you to know how to be a writer. That means understanding every step of the process, not just when to pick up the pen (or put it down) or open up the laptop (or close it shut). Their new book, The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer, includes tips on finding and entering writing contests, applying for and taking writing retreats, navigating the seas of self-publishing, finding an agent and working with an editor, and building a sustainable career."

Book sales up in UK due to the lockdown:

Alison Flood. The Guardian, 03/25/2020: Book sales surge as self-isolating readers stock up on ‘bucket list’ novels.

"Book sales surge as self-isolating readers stock up on ‘bucket list’ novels." I'm assuming the UK libraries are now closed, as is the case in much of the U.S.

"Adult non-fiction, however, was down by 13%, as readers sought solace in imaginary worlds. ... “The sales data suggests that the UK population has indeed been preparing for long periods of isolation,” said Philip Stone at Nielsen."

Visiting a bookstore during the pandemic:

Dan Kois. Slate, 03/26/2020: One Last Trip to the Bookstore: An hour inside Capitol Hill Books, all by myself.

Addendum.

Bill Hayes. LitHub, 03/26/2020: Walking in the City Before the Bookstores Closed. "Bill Hayes Heads Downtown to Buy a Book."

>179 featherbear: Yes, UK libraries have now closed. They were extending both the number of books people could borrow and the loan period in some counties.

From the Internet Archive:

National Emergency Library: Announcing the National Emergency Library, a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.

Dan Sheehan. LitHub, 03/25/2020: Now you can read 1.4 million books for free from The National Emergency Library.

From the Archive's Blog. 03/24/2020:

Announcing a National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public.

Addendum:

Jill Lepore. New Yorker, 03/26/2020: The National Emergency Library Is a Gift to Readers Everywhere.

See reaction of some authors at >205 featherbear:

Shop online during the pandemic to support New York City independent booksellers at The Bookstore at the End of the World.

"On this page, you'll find the collective expertise and collected enthusiasm of booksellers from some of the best shops in NYC. This is no substitute for the sense of community in our home stores, but until we can work again, we're more than happy to share our favorite books. We're unemployed and open for business. Happy reading."

See also >206 featherbear:

Samples from Library of America's American Birds: A Literary Companion:

LitHub, 03/26/2020: 12 Great Writers on 12 Great American Birds.

Association item. A book I like:

Mark Cocker, photography by David Tipling, Birds & People. Not just a picture book -- though the pix are excellent -- but an ornithology/anthropology omnibus of bird & human relationships.

For crime fans, lengthy review from LARB of a recently translated Japanese "honkaku," The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda.

Tara Cheesman. Los Angeles Review of Books, 03/25/2020: Riku Onda and the Shin Honkaku Mystery.

Writers who hate writing:

Adam O'Fallon Price. The Millions, 03/26/2020: Our Work and Why We Do It.

"'I hate to write, but I love having written' is a quote variously attributed to Dorothy Parker, George R.R. Martin, Gloria Steinem, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among many others. The promiscuity of its provenance is, I think, a testimony to its relatability among writers in general. It’s difficult, in other words, to think of someone who couldn’t have said it."

The current TLS, 03/27/2020. (Some paywalled)

Lloyd Bradley. Magic vs maths: Why music always moves forward. Review of Ted Gioia, Music A Subversive History.

*Matthew Bown. Keeping up with the Gagosians: Art, wealth and precious rubbish. Review of: Michael Shnayerson, Boom: Mad money, mega dealers and the rise of contemporary art. And for old art see the following:

**Julian Bell. Work from life: Rembrandt and the opposite of death. Review of: An Van Camp, Christopher Brown and Christiaan Vogelaar, Young Rembrandt.

Alicia Rix. Vampires in evening dress: Henry James does modernism. Review of a new edition of Henry James, The Sacred Fount published by Cambridge University Press, edited by T.J. Lustig. "In the case of The Sacred Fount, however, the editor’s task is less about excavating an authoritative text than it is to provide a reassessment of a neglected and underrated work. There is little in the way of variants or revisions to account for. The challenge lies rather in the novel’s own perplexity and strangeness “diabolically, tormentingly difficult”, James confessed to his publisher) as well as in its turbulent critical history."

*A related article/review in the same issue: Josephine Livingstone, The omnivore paradox: How broader tastes in art do not lead to wider participation. Review of Jennifer C. Lena, Entitled: Discriminating tastes and the expansion of the arts -- Nathalie Olah, Steal As Much As You Can: How to win the culture wars in an age of austerity -- Sabrina Mahfouz, editor, Smashing It: Working class artists on life, art and making it happen.

**Related review: Ferdinand Mount, The magic of the everyday: A Dutch artist of earnest grasping. Review of: Ariane van Suchtelen, Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age.

Other reviews of, among others: Sebastian Barry's novel A Thousand Moons -- a collection of essays, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition, ed. by Penny Fielding & Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies: Many Inventions by Richard Menke -- Chris Ware's graphic novel, Rusty Brown -- Thomas Almeroth-Williams, City of Beasts: How animals shaped Georgian London and Anna Feuerstein, The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal creatures in literature and culture -- Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the sacred texts -- Farhad Daftary and Zulfikar Hirji, Islam, An Illustrated Journey (no LT touchstone available, but it can be found on Amazon)

Using a cellphone to read In Search of Lost Time to the end:

Sarah Boxer. The Atlantic, (from 2016): Reading Proust on My Cellphone. "I glided through sentence after sentence, volume after volume, on my Android in the nighttime darkness. The experience was remarkably ... Proustian."

Free e-books from Sesame Street:

Andrew Liszewski. Gizmodo, 03/27/2020: Parents Rejoice! Sesame Workshop Has Made 110 Sesame Street eBooks Free.

Lewis Carroll, Victorian mores regarding women. Excerpt from Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today:

Rachel Vorona Conte. Longreads, 03/2020: “The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female.

Introduction to and excerpts from a graphic novel The Oracle Code from The Millions:

Calvin Reid. The Millions, 03/27/2020: Panel Mania: ‘The Oracle Code’.

"The Oracle Code—by bestselling author Marieke Nijkamp, with art by Manuel Preitano—updates the Batman story of Barbara Gordon, daughter of Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon, who is paralyzed after a gunshot wound."

You might also want to check out the LT review via the touchstone link.

So do readers of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy* go to non-fiction about Cromwell and the times after reading the novels? Dunno. Anyway, here are recommendations from the Five Books site:

Benedict King, Five Books, 03/27/2020: Editors’ Picks: The Best Thomas Cromwell Books.

Understandably, one of the books is Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life.** But The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary? Check out King's rationale. Other titles recommended: Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529-1536 -- John Guy, Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame -- Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation.

*Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light

**The UK title is Thomas Cromwell: A Life.

Effect of the pandemic on the publishing industry in New York:

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 03/27/2020: They Were Meant to Be the Season’s Big Books. Then the Virus Struck.

"With stores temporarily shut down and other industry disruptions, some of the most anticipated titles of the spring are being pushed back to later in the year."

Two useful links I picked up from AL Direct:

Laura Ewen. American Libraries, 03/27/2020: How to Sanitize Collections in a Pandemic. "Conservators weigh in on the mysteries of materials handling during COVID-19."

From a site I was unaware, but glad to learn about:

Open Culture, 03/26/2020: How to Teach and Learn Philosophy During the Pandemic: A Collection of 450+ Philosophy Videos Free Online.

In case you're having any morbid thoughts, here's a review of a new book by Bart Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife:

Peter Stanford. 03/28/2020: To hell with hell: Bart Ehrman debunks the Christian belief in perpetual torment.

On the philosophy of travel in Emily Thomas, The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad:

Graham Elliott. Standpoint, 03/25/2020: Insights and outings.

"If, as Emily Thomas states, philosophy of travel is not “a thing”, it is her mission to make it one. Scrutinising the why, where and how of travel allows an immersion in a range of sometimes extraordinary accounts as recorded down the ages. This is not philosophy as epistemology or formal logic; rather, it is as a form of phenomenology—examining the states of being in the wider world and making sense of its perceptions and experiences."

"Every person his book," per Ranganathan or Jeff Bezos. Anyways, two sets of personalized recommendations for quarantining readers from the editors of LitHub.

Emily Temple, editor. LitHub, 03/20/2020: Our Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendations.

Ibid. LitHub, 03/27/2020: Our Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendations, Round 2.

"For Those Who Wrote In, And Also the Rest of You."

Martha Nussbaum roundup:

Agnes Callard, Boston Review, 01/21/2020: The Philosophy of Anger. "There are two problems with anger: it is morally corrupting, and it is completely correct." Taking on Strawson & Nussbaum.

Howard J. Curzer. LARB, 11/02/2017: The Philosophers’ Anger. Review of Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Boston Review, 02/19/2020: The Weakness of the Furies. "Victim anger can be useful to the political struggle, but it can also become excessive and obsessive, deforming the self."

Aaron Ben Ze'ev. LARB, 03/27/2020: Is Dignity More Important Than Humility?: On Martha Nussbaum’s “The Cosmopolitan Tradition.”

Stuart Whalley. Hedgehog Review, spring 2020: After Cosmopolitanism: Like "globalist," "cosmopolitan" has become a freighted term.

For a profile of Martha Nussbaum (might be paywalled):

Rachel Aviv. New Yorker, 07/25/2016 (so long ago! seems like I just read it ...): The Philosopher of Feelings. "Martha Nussbaum’s far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion."

On the genre of "true crime," a review of Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession:

B.D. McClay. Hedgehog Review, spring 2020: Blood Sports.

"True crime is a broad genre—broad enough that I don’t know if a general statement can be made of it without running immediately into contradiction. Still, I will venture one generalization: True crime circles two questions. The first is what it’s like to kill; the second, what it’s like to die. These are not the only questions it addresses, or even the most interesting, but they are the draw. If you are interested in crime, it is usually because you are interested in evil and if it exists, in people who have done remarkable and horrifying things, and what it is like when a line is crossed, a life is ended, and the world rips apart. Crimes tell stories of human capacity in the grimmest sense."

The sociology & snobbism of reading (Aeon doing some recycling of its content):

Frank Furedi. Aeon, 10/20/2016: Bookish Fools. "The book has always been a sign of status and refinement; a declaration of self-worth – even for those who hate to read."

Association items:

Arturo Perez-Reverte. The Club Dumas

See also the Good Reader, Bad Reader article at >53 featherbear:

Got this link via Arts and Letters Daily. Joseph Epstein formerly editor of American Scholar. Known for his literary & autobiographical essays:

Joseph Epstein. First Things, spring 2020: Learning Latin.

Reading Jenny Ofill's Weather: A Novel during the pandemic:

Sara Finnerty. The Millions, 03/30/2020: How to Survive the End of the World with Jenny Offill.

Association item. Another writer in quarantine (might be paywalled):

Leslie Jamison. New York Review of Books, 03/26/2020: ‘Since I Became Symptomatic’.

Obituary for the architecture critic Michael Sorkin, another casualty of covid-19:

Thomas de Monchaux, Mark Kroto. n+1, 03/30/2020: Precise and Prescient: On Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020.

Another obit. from WaPo:

Harrison Smith. WaPo, 03/30/2020: Michael Sorkin, who championed social justice through architecture, dies at 71 from coronavirus.

Covid-19 and pandemics recommendations from the Five Books site:

Books to Help Understand the Impact of the Coronavirus.

"...some of the book interviews our US editor, Eve Gerber, has carried out with experts at top speed in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. The lessons of history, and historical pandemics—like the so-called Spanish flu of 1918—are key. Also vital psychologically is the literature written in the midst of similar pandemics, like the Decameron, set at the height of a plague pandemic—the Black Death—in 14th century Italy.

"We’ve also listed our older interview about terrifying diseases that have been brought under control with vaccines. Our interview with Seth Mnookin includes gripping books about the fight against polio, rabies, cholera and more.

"In terms of the economic impact of the Coronavirus Covid-19, our contributing editor Benedict King, formerly an economist at the Bank of England, has put together a list of books to better understand the interaction between financial and economic crises and government economic management."

Addendum: I notice David Quammen's book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic has been overlooked; I recommend it -- quite readable.

Authors strike back at the Internet Archive (see >182 featherbear:):

Alexandra Alter. NYT, 03/30/2020: ‘Emergency’ Online Library Draws Ire of Some Authors. "Internet Archive has made 1.4 million books available free online, which some say hurts writers and advances a harmful “copyright ideology.”"

The pandemic & bookstores (see also >183 featherbear: >193 featherbear:):

Lucy Kogler. LitHub, 03/30/2020: Bookstores Serve Ideas and People: In That Way They Are Essential.

Bryce Covert. Slate, 03/30/2020: What Will Happen to Independent Bookstores?.

Michael Kohlhaas I first encountered in high school German. It was used as an example of the complexity of German literary syntax. I confess I was thwarted by what the reviewer describes as "prose ... nested with clauses that move swiftly from action to action, simultaneously suggesting logic and a lack of reason ..." Did read it in translation, however. which led to reading his complete (meager) fiction output. Ragtime borrowed a bit from it some claim. Picked up this article via Arts & Letters Daily:

Christine Smallwood. Harper's, April 2020: Through Clenched Teeth: The Cold, Frenzied Genius of Heinrich Kleist. Review of a new translation by Michael Hoffman of the novella. An earlier translation can be found in the Penguin collection The Marquise of O and other stories.

Addendum.
And this just in:

Barbara N. Nagel. Public Books, 03/30/2020: The Kleist We Need. In addition to Hoffman's translation of Michael Kohlaas, there is a new translation of The Marquise of O by Nicholas Jacobs. Another book on Kleist mentioned in the review is Katrin Pahl, Sex Changes with Kleist (published by Northwestern University Press).

One more:

Becca Rothfeld. Baffler, 04/23/2020: Crimes of Passion: The violent imagination of Heinrich von Kleist.

Also via Arts & Letters Daily. "The perplexingly alienated women of recent American fiction." Prepare for a critical scolding:

Jess Bergman. The Baffler, 03/2020: I’m Not Feeling Good at All.

Titles scolded include: Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine -- Catherine Lacey, The Answers -- Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation -- Ling Ma, Severance -- Halle Butler, The New Me -- Jessi Jezewska Stevens, The Exhibition of Persephone Q -- Hilary Leichter, Temporary (Emily Books).

Genre roundup:

Scott Indrisek. Vox, 03/31/2020: The best $193 I ever spent: A mountain of detective fiction when my wife was pregnant. Reading the Michael Connelly oeuvre.

Constance Grady. Vox, 03/30/2020: N.K. Jemisin’s new book begins with a virus in New York. Somehow, it’s a joyous read. On Jemisin's new novel, The City We Became.

Ann Patchett. NYT, 03/30/2020: Ann Patchett on Why We Need Life-Changing Books Right Now. "That night I read “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,” and, well, it changed my life. I couldn’t remember when I had read such a perfect novel. I didn’t care what age it was written for. The book defied categorization. I felt as if I had just stepped through a magic portal, and all I had to do to pass through was believe that I wasn’t too big to fit. This beautiful world had been available to me all along but I had never bothered to pick up the keys to the kingdom."

Agnes Callard. NYT, 03/31/2020: Why Am I Reading Apocalyptic Novels Now? "If something frightening is happening, I want to be afraid of it. When things are bad, I want to suffer."

Jeana Jorgensen. LARB, 03/30/2020: Mermaids from Across the Seven Seas: On “The Penguin Book of Mermaids.”

The UK edition of Hurricane Season was reviewed in TLS (see >94 featherbear:) though it had not yet been published in the U.S. So now a review of the recently published U.S. edition:

Amanda Dennis. LARB, 03/31/2020: A Terrible Beauty: On Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season." The murder of a "witch" in a Mexican village, told from various perspectives.

A fuller profile of Sanmao (see >134 featherbear:). author of Stories of the Sahara:

Han Zhang. New Yorker, 03/31/2020: Reading Sanmao, the Taiwanese Wayfarer Who Sold 15 Million Books.

W.H. Auden's housekeeping:

Seamus Perry. Paris Review, 03/25/2020: W. H. Auden Was a Messy Roommate.

Sounds like my place, sans roommate, and I'm not even "creative."