In 1969, Random House’s Book of the Month Club offered members an edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dalí. (You can view the full collection here.) Forty-three years later, the publisher had a mail delivery experience that was almost equally surreal.
Truly A Random House
Two Moons, Two Reviews
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Charles Yu describes reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as not so much reading it, but rather “liv[ing] with it for a while.” I bet our own Kevin Hartnett would agree.
Antebellum YA
Move over Bella and Edward; Scarlett and Rhett were the original young adult power couple. At The New York Times, Claire Needell argues that Gone with the Wind is the epitome of the young adult novel. “The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.”
Light of Lepidoptery
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The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.
Even longer reads
Smithsonian takes a look at Byliner and The Atavist and what the success and innovation of these two companies can tell us about the hopeful state of longform narrative journalism. Fast Company’s Co.Design ran an image heavy interview with The Atavist’s developer, Jefferson Rabb. I’d add Long Reads to the list too.
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No Wonder They Spend More Time, Then
Are these two statistics linked? According to a Pew Internet Libraries study, 30% of those “who read e-content say they now spend more time reading,” and according to studies cited on CreativePro, people can read printed text read “25% faster than on-screen text.”
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