Administrators at Cushing Academy in Massachusetts “have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.” (Thanks to Millions reader Laurie who asks, “So what happens when the power goes out?”)
The Bookless Library
Poets Ride Free
One Siberian city is offering free subway rides to passengers who can recite “at least two verses from any poem by Alexander Pushkin.” The obvious corollary would be NJ Transit providing free service to passengers capable of singing “Born to Run” in its entirety.
I’m With the Ogres
There’s a tiff going on between Ursula le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro. After le Guin accused Ishiguro of “despising” the fantasy genre, following an interview with the Times in which he wondered aloud if his readers would be prejudiced against his latest book, Ishiguro defended himself, claiming that he is “firmly on the side of the ogres and the pixies.” You can read a full rundown in The Guardian.
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Ghosts in the Stacks
A voracious reader named “Chuck Finley” was such a prolific library patron that he singlehandedly increased a Florida branch’s circulation by 3.9%. But there’s a problem: he’s not real. (h/t Kirstin Butler.)
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V. I. G.
A V.I.G. (very important garment) will be making its way to the U.S. this August. Pride and Prejudice fans can now see the shirt Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity.” We rewrote the title of Pride and Prejudice and other books as clickbait. You should definitely read it.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Evison, Oates, Theroux, Fontane
New this week is Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story about the death of her husband (this was the source of her recent, quite moving essay in the New Yorker), and the expanded rerelease of Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Also new on shelves from NYRB Classics is Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, who discussed Fontane in our Year in Reading in December.
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They replaced their 20,000 books with 18 Kindles. WOW. An entire 18 people can use their “library” at the same time. Oh, I forgot about the 3 tvs that they can also be watching.
Ah, but the students didn’t want those smelly old books anyway:
“School officials said when they checked library records one day last spring only 48 books had been checked out, and 30 of those were children’s books.”