From Jared Fanning, a charming graphic of the world’s 10 most read books.
Bookshelf of the Masses
It Was Nothing, Really
W.H. Auden lived a secret life, not as a man with a second family or an illicit habit but as, weirdly enough, a genuinely kind human being. He paid for a friend’s costly operation and camped outside the apartment of a woman who suffered from night terrors until she felt safe enough to sleep on her own again. So why did the poet want to hide his good deeds? He claimed he didn’t want to be admired for basic decency.
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Tale of a Jetblack Sunrise
Every year, for six months, a mysterious Twitter account tweets the Walt Whitman book Leaves of Grass in its entirety one line at a time. At The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen profiles the account, which (to the owner’s bemusement) is popular among Lana Del Rey fans.
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What is a diverse book?
Year in Reading alum Rumaan Alam reflects at The Literary Hub about the labels we ascribe to texts. Pair with his recent interview with Lindsay Hatton.
True Crime, True Empathy
Why are women the primary consumers of true crime literature while an overwhelming majority of the genre showcases violence towards women? Over at Hazlitt, Casey Johnston has a few ideas about this seemingly irreconcilable paradox. Here is a complementary piece by Ujala Sehgal for The Millions on the female True Detectives of literature.
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Scribbles in August
From 1916 to 1925, the University of Mississippi paid William Faulkner for drawings he published in the school newspaper, Ole Miss. At Open Culture, you can see some of these drawings, which struck this writer as peculiarly un-Faulknerian. (Related: our own Nick Moran found recordings of Faulkner on the University of Virginia website.) (h/t The Paris Review)
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Unavoidable Anachronism
What can we learn from anachronisms? That mistakes are “ultimately unavoidable – the best you can hope for is to keep them to a minimum and noticeable only by a tiny coterie of demanding experts” – and that if those mistakes are big enough, they can eventually turn into “enduring ideological constructs.”
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