Our own Mark O’Connell has an excellent piece over on The New Yorker‘s books blog detailing his propensity to abandon burritos books, even good ones, halfway through.
Finish that book. Finish that burrito.
The Puddlies
Powell’s Books announces their Puddly Awards. Vote for your favorite book of the last decade.
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Loss in the Time of War
“War happens when words no longer work. Yet war is declared at the very point when words are at their most powerful. It’s an odd kind of paradox. In a time of war, the familiar words of your own language can become even more significant, as language is linked to the idea of home.” At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at trauma and language loss.
Weather Permitting
What can you do with all the snow? Shelley Jackson is making stories out of it. The artist is writing a story entirely in snow. You can read the first 200 words of her tale on her Flickr. It begins, “To approach snow too closely is to forget what it is…”
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True Blood
Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries (recently reincarnated as HBO’s True Blood), talks with Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore for her interview series “The Criminal Calendar.” See the first of six YouTube installments here. Harris, like her most famous heroine, offers a mix of canny intuition and folksy charm. Asked about the bisexuality of one very old vampire in “the Sookie-verse” she answers Peters, “I figure if you live that long, you might as well diversify. Wouldn’t you get bored, you would think–you’d be willing to try anything if you live that long.”
A Titillating Read
The new book by Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex, addresses exactly what you’d think it would based on a glance at its title. According to de Botton, the word “sexy,” at base, refers to people or things which mimic our deeply-held values. At Brain Pickings, you can read more excerpts.
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A Monument to Suffering and Courage
Everyone is talking about Nobel Prize winning Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Allow Jonathon Sturgeon at Flavorwire to explain why he believes Alexievich’s victory is a step in the right direction for the Prize.
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Poet Szymborska Dies
The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, who contributed to samizdat magazines before the fall of the Iron Curtain, died yesterday. Among her more popular collections is View with a Grain of Sand.
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Not Your Father’s Canon
Electric Literature has launched the “Read More Women” series—a “stripped-down, feminist version” of the New York Times “By the Book” column—which will feature writers recommending books by women and non-binary authors. First up in the series is Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Mere Wife.