Amazon has announced that all seven Harry Potter books will be available via its Kindle Lending Library starting on June 19th.
Borrow Harry Potter Electronically
Now Is Not the Time for Realism
Recommended Listening: Margaret Atwood on her new novel – one of the most anticipated books of 2015, and the fall of realistic fiction. As she explains it, “when there’s perceived instability that’s happening you can’t write [a so-called realistic] novel and have people believe it.”
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‘The Joy Luck Club’ Turns 25
On the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan looks back on the landmark novel and its subsequent film adaptation.
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Finnegans Punk
Forget One Direction. Meet the little known boy band made up of John Cage, James Joyce, and Joey Ramone. Cage composed a song based on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake called “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” which Ramone later sang to haunting effect.
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The Will to Climb
The Seattle Times reviews The Will to Climb by Bainbridge Island mountaineer Ed Viesturs (with David Roberts), which chronicles what it takes to climb Annapurna, a particularly challenging Himalayan peak. Viesturs appears tonight at Town Hall Seattle.
A 20 Year Overnight Success
Joe Fassler interviews recent MacArthur Genius and Year-in-Reading alum Viet Thanh Nguyen on the myth of overnight success, balancing an academic career while still finding time to write novels and the sacrifices all writers must make. Over at Electric Literature.
The Kindle World
Apropos of Mark O’Connell‘s contemplation of the Kindle is this piece by The Guardian‘s Sam Leith on what to expect if the Kindle truly does supplant the printed book.
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Facebook’s Most Popular Titles
We’ve mentioned the “What books have stayed with you?” social media trend before, and now Facebook has tallied up the most popular titles by country. The results are both exactly what you would expect – The Little Prince ranks high in France, One Hundred Years of Solitude fairs well in Latin America – and a little surprising as the Harry Potter series tops the list in countries ranging from India to Italy to Brazil.
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Words & Symbols
Mairead Small Staid writes on the history and poetics of the ampersand, “a logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all.”
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