Amid further discussion and exploration of marginalia, a discovery of cartoon marginalia in the New Yorker archives.
Cartoon Marginalia
Curiosities: Smoldering Eyebrows
E-book pricing wars continue. Sony tries to hit the Kindle where it hurts by offering cheaper e-books. Meanwhile, $0 is becoming an important price point at the Kindle store.Sam Anderson hates Thomas Pynchon.An indie bookstore fan uses our bookstore tour as a jumping-off point for a literary day in Manhattan. You can too.
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Finding Adventure
“I had seen enough movies to know that when a knife is tossed by the hero to someone in need, it lands exactly where it should. So I picked up the knife, and I centered myself. ‘Be the hero,’ I whispered.” Caroline Paul’s The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, “part memoir, part manifesto, part aspirational workbook,” encourages everyone to add a little more adventure to their lives. Angela Qian writes about the adventure of learning to read in another language.
Literature By The Numbers
The New York Times reports that the titles of every British book published in English in the 19th century (1,681,161, to be exact) are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer insight into the Victorian mind.
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Cheap Night Club, South Side of Chicago
Year in Reading alumnus Thomas Mallon’s foreword to the new edition of John O’Hara’s 1940 novel Pal Joey is available in The Paris Review Daily. Mallon predicts that “ O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival—outdated enough to be exotic—may at last be upon us.”
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You May Call Me Bobby, Or You May Call Me Zimmy
In more “Dylan at 70” news, the knowledgeable Ed Ward reviews the compilation How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan for The Oxford American. (Editor’s Note: The omission from this album of Nina Simone‘s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and Ben E. King‘s “Lay Lady Lay” are both unconscionable.)
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Ghosts of the Tsunami
People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s forthcoming book on the Tōhoku earthquake and its aftermath, Ghosts of the Tsunami, will be released some time in late summer/early fall, and BBC Radio put together a 30-minute teaser to tide you over until then. You can also check out Parry’s moving yet unsettling piece for the London Review of Books.
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Where the Letters Go
A startling conclusion from this data visualization of where in words each letter of the alphabet tends to fall: “the most common word may be ‘the, but the most representative word is ‘toe.’ ” (Also available: detailed methodology and algorithms for the data geeks; an explanation of data-viz as a narrative form for everyone else.)
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