Graphic designer Jason Huff takes the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduces them (pdf) using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function. Book Bench highlights several of the absurd – if occasionally poetic – results.
AutoSummarizing the Classics
Oh, Edward!
Oh, those poor little Twilight-addled tweens–as if they weren’t already goggly-eyed with quasi-chaste adoration of Edward Cullen, hero of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight books. How they will melt when they see this utterly shameless New Moon poster that portrays a melancholic Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in a state of tasteful-ish dishabille.
Red Scare
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism (assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to human progress.” Wait, what? The New York Review of Books reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
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The Pioneer Detectives Comes to a TV Near You
Last week Konstantin Kakaes — whose new book The Pioneer Detectives is our latest Millions Original — led a discussion on “how scientists search for truth and how that search isn’t always straight-forward.” You can catch a broadcast of that discussion tonight on BookTV at 7:30 PM.
Serialized Storytelling
Why so Serious?
Jonathan Lethem thinks his work is taken too seriously. “Well, I was just watching Richard Pryor, and he says, ‘When you’re dating a white woman, and people don’t like it, you can’t really pretend. You can’t go, “Oh, she’s not with me.”‘ ‘You write the big, ambitious books, right?’ Well, I guess they are,” he said in an interview with Salon. He also discusses being equated with Jonathan Franzen and his new novel, Dissident Gardens.
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Illustrated Joyce
Stony Road Press has teamed up with the James Joyce Centre to release a limited edition handmade book, “reproducing the original 1914 text” of “The Dead,” and featuring really interesting hand printed illustrations by Robert Berry. Check out some examples here, here, and here.
On people braver than us:
Erika Anderson recites her teenage poetry at readings and shares her reasoning for doing so. “I want to live where irony meets kindness, where daring meets bullshit, where everything that failed meets the hope that something might not. I hope my readers do too.”