Compassionate procrastination for vocab nerds! Improve your vocabulary (or study for the SAT) while helping end world hunger at Free Rice.
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Monday Links
We’ve got some great stuff in the pipeline at The Millions, starting with a lierary magazine roundtable (part one of which will be up shortly), but before we get to that a couple of quick links:This week at the LBC we’re discussing our winter 2007 Read This! selection, Wizard of the Crow by Ngugl wa Thiong’o. A roundtable discussion kicks off a week that will include a contest, an interview, a podcast, and more.Speaking of the LBC, a past selection, and one of my favorites from among the books we’ve read, Firmin by Sam Savage, has been named a finalist for the Barnes & Noble 2006 Discover Great New Writers Awards. That little rat just keeps on trucking along.And finally, Robert Birnbaum sits down with Richard Ford (again) for another great interview. Thanks to Millions contributor Noah, we had some great coverage of Ford’s most recent book, The Lay of the Land, in November, including a review, a reader question, and a (very brief) interview..
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Curiosities
Anne Fernald’s two posts about her grandmother’s editions of Virginia Woolf are a treat.Gwenda Bond of Shaken and Stirred landed on NPR over the weekend to talk about the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables, in honor of which the Modern Library has put out a new edition.The Oxford Project: “In 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every single resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa.” It’s a neat sounding photo book, reminiscent of La Porte, Indiana.Under 30? Really good at writing book reviews? You should enter VQR’s Young Reviewers Contest.It’s an alarm clock that wakes you up with the voice of Stephen Fry in the character of Jeeves. You can listen to all the recordings at the site. An example: “Let us seize the day and take it roughly from behind… as the Colonel used to say in his unfortunate way.”
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Memories of Books
Writer Philip Graham reflected on reading after cataract surgery made reading (temporarily) impossible.
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Dial G
“Genius” is a loaded term. Its application usually says more about the person making the judgment than it does about the genius in question. In The Guardian, Sophie Hannah argues that the term isn’t used enough to describe one writer in particular: Agatha Christie. You could also read Daniel Friedman on the terrible secret of all crime fiction.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Edugyan, D’Agata, Manguso, Ullman, Herbert, Shadid, Baseball
Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is now out in the U.S. Also new this week are John D’Agata’s much-discussed Lifespan of a Fact, Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, Ellen Ullman’s By Blood and The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert, who has an essay up on our site today. The new memoir by Anthony Shadid has seen its release date pushed up to this week. See our remembrance of Shadid. Finally, it’s Christmas for baseball fans: the 2012 Baseball Prospectus is out.
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I love this thing! I used to play obsessively when I started my current job and wasn’t given anything to do. It actually helps you study for the GRE, because it’s Computer Adaptive or whatever.
I think I’ll go play a few (hundred) rounds.