The most striking thing about Google’s effort to block Sweden from coining a word for “ungoogleable” (“ogooglebar”) is that the proposed Swedish word somehow sounds more English than its actual translation.
“Var inte ond”
Reading Your Way to Sochi
Another day, another LARB piece about reading Russian fiction in conjunction with the Winter Olympics. (One particularly interesting earlier installment is over here.) Meanwhile, I offer a compendium of passages from the Russian masters, and use my favorite #SochiFails to illustrate them.
Pathological Point-Making
Recommended Reading: Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker on what makes an essay “American.”
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The One-Sitting Novel
Looking to start (and finish!) a novel in a day? Electric Literature has 17 short novel recommendations, including work from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shirley Jackson and Marilynne Robinson.
Recommend Them One at a Time
In The New York Times, Anne Lamott (of Bird by Bird fame) reveals the one book she’d recommend to President Obama. It might not surprise many readers of her memoir that her choice — Anti-California: Report from our First Parafascist State — is a nonfiction book by her father.
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A rare thing, the antiquarian
The New York Times recently ran an in depth look at the process of learning to deal in rare books. Which made me think of The Monkey’s Paw, a rare book store so good that twice now I’ve personally heard rare book dealers (at both Sellers and Newel and Paper Books) describe, with admiration and a dash of collegial envy, as everyone’s favorite book store.
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Year in Writing
“In order to overcome their creative challenges, the authors I interviewed didn’t need to write prettier sentences: They needed to become more disciplined, more generous, braver. Literature seems to require these qualities of us, somehow, both in writing and in reading.” Joe Fassler‘s “By Heart” series at The Atlantic provides us with another year’s worth of writing wisdom, including advice from Alexander Chee, Michael Chabon, Lydia Millet, et al. We also highly recommend the conversation between Chee, Emily Barton, and Whitney Terrell about the decade each of them took to see their novels realized in the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Occupy Lessons
Does Washington D.C. still have enough revolutionary spirit to drive the Occupy movement to the impossible-to-ignore phase of Resurrection City? Even after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, his message of economic equality presses on.