If you were never satisfied with Hamlet’s answer to the famous “to be or not to be?” question, now is your chance to change it. Ryan North rewrote Hamlet as a choose-your-own-adventure book, To Be or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or King Hamlet and choose from more than 110 alternate deaths. Brain Pickings got a first look at some of the book’s excellent illustrations.
How to Be
Finnegans Wake Hits Chinese Shelves
I don’t know how they managed to translate the thunderwords into Chinese, but if sales figures indicate success, they did a bang up job. Finnegans Wake is huge in China right now.
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Meteor Shower
Check out Clint Smith’s poem “Meteor Shower” at the Diverse Arts Project. Not into poetry? We have ten poems for people who hate poetry.
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Calendar Girls
If you’re bored with the typical sexy firefighter holiday calendar, the Rhode Island Library Association can help. The Tattooed Librarians of the Ocean State 2014 calendar features Rhode Island librarians and their ink. “We’re trying to give a voice to the up-and-coming generation of librarians. We’re not your grandmother’s library,” librarian and association president Jenifer Bond said. You can buy your calendar at the site for $12-15.
Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
Brit Bennett on the Opposite Sides of the Color Line
Brit Bennett discusses her latest book, The Vanishing Half, which follows twin sisters as one lives life as a white woman and one as a Black woman.
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An Irish Take on the NYC Grid
New York City’s municipal grid turns 200 this year. To commemorate, author and Year in Reading alumna Belinda McKeon notes the way New Yorkers utilize it as they “don’t wander so much as dart” from place to place.
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Overlooked by the New York Times
On International Women’s Day the New York Times launched Overlooked, a project that features the obituaries of remarkable women who did not receive the NYT obituary treatment when they passed away. It turns out only 20% of NYT obituaries were about women. Overlooked will seek to remedy this oversight by posting new obituaries of female icons weekly for the rest of 2018. Of particular note to our readers this week; Charlotte Bronte, Qiu Jin, Nella Larsen, Sylvia Plath and Ida B. Wells. But all 15 obituaries are worth reading, whether to learn something new or refresh your memory.
Tarantino on Writing
Say what you want about Quentin Tarantino; the man thinks like a writer. You can hear him doing so out loud on the current episode of KCRW’s The Treatment, with Elvis Mitchell.
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