Recommended Reading: An excerpt from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 in which the author has dinner with Helen Keller.
Twain and Keller
On Literary Blogging
Book Snobbishness: “Using your personal taste or literary standards to dictate to other people what they should spend their time or money on. It’s not just about looking down on someone for reading romance or science fiction (though that’s part of it, of course), but also about shaming readers for where they spend money or the format in which they read.” Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot, sits down with 0s&1s to talk about gender, books and blogging. To get your fill of literary blogging, check out our list of must-read literary Tumblrs.
●
●
American Experience: Jesse Owens
The Summer Olympics begin in exactly one month, so I recommend checking out this 52-minute American Experience episode on Olympic legend Jesse Owens to set the tone.
It’s Darcy, Isn’t It
Why do Americans love Jane Austen so much? The BBC (who else) takes a look at possible reasons.
POTUS Picks
For its November issue, Wired asks guest editor President Obama for a list of his 10 essential books. The magazine estimates that reading all of them, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Katherine Boo‘s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, will take only eighty-nine hours.