Now that Google Reader is nearing its official death, the people who used to depend on it are waxing nostalgic about its heyday. At Page-Turner, Joshua Rothman remembers the feeds he once relied on.
Death of a Reader
The Giver Trailer is Out
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Details are vague
China Miéville on apocalyptic London for The New York Times Magazine: “Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for ‘total policing. ‘ He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague.”
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“I Do (Plan To Read That)”
Attention, lovebirds! Amanda Bullock put together a list of “29 Things You Must Read Before You Get Married.”
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Unaffiliated
Helen Vendler is one of those rare scholar-writers who doesn’t adhere to a particular school of theory. In her new book of essays, she explains her view of criticism as distinct from both philosophy and scholarship, as a form of learning that’s inherently “unsystematic and idiosyncratic.” In Open Letters Monthly, Jack Hanson reads through the book. You could also read Jonathan Farmer on Rita Dove’s letter to Vendler.
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Chris Ware’s Radical Honesty
Hannah Means-Shannon shares a dispatch from the Rocky Mountain Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in which Building Stories author (and Year in Reading alum) Chris Ware discusses his creative processes.
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Family Language
Our own Bruna Dantas Lobato reflects on her position living between languages. “I learned English out of necessity and that comes with its own problems—aesthetic and political ones. With childhood in one language and a writing life in the other, I’m standing both inside and outside my mother tongue and my stepmother tongue.” Pair with a piece on the important role of translators in literature.
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