Recommended Reading: this graphic short story by Ben Nadler and Alyssa Berg.
“An American train can’t help but dream of the West”
Read Like A Victorian
The website Victorian Serial Novels lets you experience 19th-century novels “serially and in their cultural contexts.” Select your author, the timespan within which you want installments to come, and enjoy.
How to choose what to read first? Not to worry, these six Dickensian experts have you covered.
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Clickity-Clack
Half a century ago, it would have been inconceivable to think that one day, the clack of typewriter keys would disappear from daily life. The rise of the personal computer, in Sadie Stein’s words, turned an everpresent sound into a “living anachronism.” She reflects on the value of the typewriter in a blog post for The Paris Review Daily. (It might also be a good time to read our own Bill Morris on typewriters and pen pals.)
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England’s Green and Pleasant Land
William Blake may have described its “green and pleasant land” but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
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Too Dark for TV
“This is a huge generalization, but [American novels] have tended not to have all the elements that make it good for television, whether it’s too interior or there’s not enough action. The Brits tended to write more colorful stories rather than the darkness and struggle. Dickens and Trollope certainly knew how to write sequels, books that would make good ongoing series again and again. And the greatest love stories are in the Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know what our equivalent is.” In a piece for The Atlantic Spencer Kornhaber wonders, “Is American Literature Too Dark for TV?“
Remember This?
Before his death of natural causes in 2008, Henry Gustave Molaison had the world’s most famous brain. At 27, Molaison permanently lost the ability to form new memories, which led to him spending the rest of his life in “thirty-second loops of awareness.” In the LRB, Mike Jay reviews a new book on Molaison, Permanent Present Tense.
Turing Geoff Dyer’s Frown Upside Down
“The Dyer visage in repose, its default setting, is that of a man whose jam has regularly been stolen from his doughnut.” Despite how he is prone to frowning, Geoff Dyer believes a smile can make the world a better place.
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