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
My Roommate
As literary apprenticeships go, it’s hard to beat a chance to live with Doris Lessing. In 1963, not long after the death of Sylvia Plath, Jenny Diski moved in with the future Nobel laureate, who lived just north of King’s Cross in London at the time. In the LRB, Diski recounts her friendship with the novelist.
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Beginner’s Luck
“Our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix,” the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris. On how Voltaire outsmarted one of the earliest lotteries and made a fortune. Also check out how Goethe became an amateur auction theorist.
Famous in India
“His writings rarely make it to the US, and are resolutely for an Indian readership. They will win no prizes nor inspire dissertations. But for these reasons they represent the actuality of what many people in the world are reading today, outside of the newly sanctified category of the ‘global novel.’” Ulka Anjaria for Public Books on Chetan Bhagat, “possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever” and largely unheard of in the west. For more fictional Desi perspectives, read Aditya Desai in our own pages on reading narratives of Indian women.
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Brave New Serial
Margaret Atwood’s got a new book called Positron out, and she’s going digital: the novel is being published serially via Byliner.
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Longreads Launches Membership Drive
Like the Girl Scouts, Longreads offers a tantalizing product that many people find indispensable. And, also like the Girl Scouts, they now do membership drives. To participate, sign up to be a member and donate a minimum of $3 a month or $30 a year.
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.”