In Salon, Laura Miller discusses two new studies showing a correlation between the number of books in a child’s household and the level of education that child’s likely to attain: “Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.”
Book ownership and education
Rachel Kushner and the Costa Concordia
Recommended reading: Rachel Kushner writes about the Costa Concordia disaster, cruise ships in general, and her own short-lived “aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training” for The London Review of Books.
Wednesday Links
Some very cool Hunter S. Thompson photography showing now at an LA gallery. The show coincides with a pricey new “collector’s edition” book that “presents a rare look into the life of Thompson.” (via)Another most literate cities list has arrived. In 2006, Seattle wins, with Minneapolis second. My hometown Washington, DC, is tied for third and LA, where I lived when I started this blog, is eighth. The last two cities I’ve lived in, Chicago (39th) and, now, Philadelphia (tied for 33rd), fail to crack the top ten. Not sure what conclusions I can draw about that, but USA Today draws its own conclusions in an article about the list.Somebody gets into Gwenda’s garbage, her papers fly everywhere, and before you know it, she’s cought in a “indie movie scene wrought with ironic symbolism.” Brilliant.Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks. Also Brilliant. (via Languagehat)On a more serious note, Tim O’Reilly explains why the book search efforts of Google, et al, are broken. The problem is that we must search in Google’s (or Yahoo’s) walled garden. There is no way to search across all of the books that have been digitized, which is very much at odds with our experience on the Web, where we can search everything at once.
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Barack’s Book Club
George Pelecanos is the latest worthy writer to get the Obama bump.
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Cultivating Profit
In an attempt to shift attention away from the ongoing E. coli scandal, Chipotle has announced the next round of authors whose work will be appearing on their cups as part of their ongoing Cultivating Thought series. Look for pieces by Amy Tan, Jeffery Eugenides, Neil Gaiman, and Barbara Kingsolver among five or six others – just be careful of the burritos.
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David Mitchell’s Next Novel
In an interview about his Russian fans, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell shares some details about his next book project. Put simply, “It’s about an immortal being that gets reincarnated as different men and women,” Mitchell says.
Ellis Backs Franzen
According to Vulture, Bret Easton Ellis firmly backs Team Franzen in the forthcoming issue of The Paris Review. That issue, by the way, hits shelves next week. I know because I saw a video of it on the printing press.
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Whiting Award Recipients 2016
This year’s Whiting Award winners have been announced. The award recognizes “ten emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, and are based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior work to come.” The winners include Catherine Lacey (of Nobody Is Ever Missing); Alice Sola Kim (of Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying); and Ocean Vuong (of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, among other books).
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