The team running The Electric Typewriter’s Tumblr have assembled a list of “150 Essential Science & Tech Reads.” Got any suggestions for what they might’ve missed? Add them in the comments.
150 Essential Science & Tech Reads
Pynchon Possessed by the Spirit of a Teenaged Girl
“Though female authors write experimental novels about women—like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?—the avant-garde has long been associated with male authors and stories. That association made Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine seem doubly unusual.” On Kleeman’s debut novel and blatantly feminine themes in the avant-garde.
●
●
He Is Not Pynchon
Penguin released a book trailer for the newest Thomas Pynchon novel in which a guy in a T-shirt that reads “I’m Pynchon” stands on a rooftop on the “Yupper” West Side and talks about his life. (To find out why I used the term “Yupper,” check out the recent New York mag piece on Pynchon that I wrote about last week.)
CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
Bildungsroman Babble
The coming-of-age novel is a lot older than most of its protagonists. Gabriel Roth and sometime Millions contributor Kristopher Jansma will discuss the history of the genre at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 28 at the Center for Fiction in New York City. You can read Jansma’s past Millions essays on watching The Killing and searching for lost J.D. Salinger stories.
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Identical Halves
“By running two lives that started from the same point off along divergent tracks, they throw up questions about our uniqueness, and the chances and choices that make us who we are.” On identical twins in literature, from Stephen King to Shakespeare. Also check out Ramona Ausubel’s essay on first children and first novels.
●
●
Pshaw! Gulp! Excelsior! Ach!
For 50 years, The New York Review of Books has written some of the best headlines in the business. Matthew Howard rounds up every headline. Our favorites include: “Don’t Sing Your Crap,” “How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Baudelaire!“, “Welcome to New Dork,” “It’s Your Fault, Henry James,” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Paradox.”
The F-Bomb on the Silver Screen
Wikipedia Find of the Week: A list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck.”
●
●
They aren’t exactly “reads” in the context of this post, but my votes for best science related reading are “The History of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, “The Tangled Wing” by Melvin Konner about the biological bases of human behavior, “The Unsettling of America” by Wendell Berry about the environmental impact of industrial agriculture, and “Gödel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter that’s nominally about computers, but includes a lot else.