How could anybody believe Henry David Thoreau invented raisin bread? The Walden author once burned down about 300 acres of forest trying to cook fish!
Transcendentalist by Day; Awful Cook by Night
Cinderella, as Told by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit gives the classic and rather dated tale of Cinderella an empowered, nuanced update that examines cultural myths about measures of prosperity.
●
●
●
The Perils of Book Lending
We’ve all been there, right? Your neighbor lends you a book, you don’t treat it very carefully, she complains, so you thrust a samurai sword inches from her face. It happens.
●
●
Chosen One Narratives
Rainbow Rowell’s newest book, Carry On, is out now. Here she is interviewed by Nicole Chung over at The Toast. Our own Janet Potter has a moving essay on Rowell and young love that may also be of interest to you.
●
●
David Rees’s New Television Show
Get Your War On creator and How to Sharpen Pencils author David Rees was recently interviewed about his new show on the National Geographic channel. The premise behind the new venture is simple: “anything in the world that seems like there’s nothing to learn about, that’s what we want to learn about.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace, O’Rourke, Levy
It seems almost silly to mention it since the book’s been on shelves and discussed in the book pages for a couple of weeks now, but the “official” release date of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is this Friday. (Our review was published today.) Meghan O’Rourke’s grief memoir The Long Goodbye is out this week. And another look at our culture through the lens of our technology is now out, Steven Levy’s In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.
●
●
On “Buzzwordophilia”
In the latest Baffler, Evgeny Morozov argues that Silicon Valley, in typical fashion, has taken to “hacking” our language. Old, trusted words don’t mean what they used to mean, and complex ideas have been stripped of subversive implications. “Complexity,” he writes, “is not particularly viral.”
●
●
So many wobbly assumptions
Laura Miller pokes some holes in that Dartmouth study about how little classic literature appears to be influencing contemporary writers.
Writing About Suicide
Recommended reading: Philip Connors, whose memoir All the Wrong Places was included in our 2015 Book Preview, writes for the New Yorker about his brother’s death and the problems with “cathartic” writing.
●
●