Pew Internet finds that tablet and e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holiday gift-giving period 29% of Americans now own at least one of these digital reading devices. Meanwhile, the content producers keep rushing in, with NBC Universal launching an e-book arm and Apple’s textbook scheme netting 350,000 downloads in three days.
The E-Reader and Tablet Tidal Wave
Offshore Seinfeld
One Indian call center’s “culture training” involves the study of Seinfeld episodes, writes Andrew Marantz. Hopefully they don’t screen the Harold Pinter-inspired episode, “The Betrayal.” Meanwhile, Joshua Kurp has located most of George’s ex-girlfriends.
Why Reread?
Nabokov once claimed “there is no reading, only rereading.” In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks pursues the “key to rereading,” taking The Waste Land and Mrs. Dalloway as his test cases.
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Song of Myself
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell delves into the history of the self-interview, which you can find many examples of over at The Nervous Breakdown. Mark cites examples of self-interviews by prominent writers, including Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Year in Reading alum John Banville.
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RIP Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco, Italian semiotician and author of works such as Theory of Semiotics and The Name of the Rose, has died at 84. His most famous work, The Name of the Rose, was adapted in a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. Reflect on his life by revisiting Hillary Kelly’s review of Confessions of a Young Novelist.
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The Poetic Meter of a Viral Tweet
Frankie Thomas dissects why her viral tweet, an ode to Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Cohen, and Shakespeare, seemed to speak to our need for poetic meter.
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A Life in Books
“Reading is a type of reckoning with the self. That may sound like a simplistic platitude, but platitudes exist only because they are true, our self-serving intellectual mirrors be damned.” Cher Tan shares a lifetime’s reading history with Catapult, tracing her trajectory from “[k]eeping up with the boys” during high school to this past year, in which she made a personal pact to read only books written by people of color. Pair with our own Nick Ripatrazone in conversation with six authors on their childhood reading.
The Whale Arrives
The work of Elvio Gandolfo, whose novel Cada vez más cerca (“Each Time Closer”) won Argentina’s equivalent of the Pulitzer in 2013, is rarely published in English. So it’s a special treat to find his magical story about a whale falling out of the sky, newly translated for the anthology A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, available free at Ninth Letter.