Clive Thompson, of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, owns a digital copy of War and Peace but had his 16,000 words of notes and annotations printed and bound into a physical book. This, he says, may be the way of the future of reading.
Print the future.
The Perils of Being a Hermit
It might not be a good idea to tell this to bookish readers, but it looks like loneliness can kill you.
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The working mother’s guide to writing a novel
Over at the Los Angeles Times, novelist and critic Mary McNamara offers a working mother’s guide to writing a novel. A glimpse into the life of someone who’s way better at managing her time than I am.
Word comics of the day
Recommended RSS-ing: A better word of the day from artist Tory Hoke, who pairs each unusual word with a hand-drawn comic. Friday’s entry, “spurcitious,” is charmingly defined in relation to a thumb and a hammer. Hate pictures? Other tried-and-true options include curators at Merriam-Webster, The New York Times, and this guy on Twitter.
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Literary Tastemaker Extraordinare
“In a new biography, The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Laura Claridge argues that Blanche Knopf was actually the more important and influential of the two Knopfs. That’s a stretch, but her book is still a long-overdue acknowledgment of the pioneering role Blanche played at a time when women were nearly invisible in the business world.” Find out more about Blanche Knopf at The New Yorker. Edan Lepucki’s 2011-2012 list on why not to self-publish is still relevant.
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Against “Continental Categories”
“I don’t divide my friendships into continental categories. I don’t think: Today I’ll have lunch with my European friend, and tomorrow I will invite my Asian friend to the park. It would be silly of me to think of the authors I read in those terms. End of topic.” The (still relatively) new Literary Hub interviews Valeria Luiselli about the literary tradition, authors’s names, magical realism and her new novel, The Story of My Teeth.
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