Michele Filgate was so terrified by Dave Eggers’s The Circle that she quit social media for a week and wrote about the experience for Salon. “I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process.” Pair with: our review of the novel.
Vicious Circle
The True Face of the Earth
As Le Petit Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.” Perhaps that can be extrapolated for satellites, too. Either way, if this incredible, orbital HD Vimeo footage doesn’t move you, then I don’t know what could.
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The Cartoon Curator
Didn’t find the latest New Yorker cartoon funny? Take it up with The New Yorker‘s cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, who discusses the magazine’s “idea drawings” and humor in his TED talk, Anatomy of a New Yorker Cartoon. Bonus: check out Mankoff’s favorite New Yorker cartoons.
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Incorporating Elements
“I gave up on making a happy ending in the true sense a long time ago.” Japanese animator and film director Hayao Miyazaki is something of a legend. Over at The Literary Hub, Gabrielle Bellot takes a look at the expansive literary history of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Johnson; Ford; Millet; Hunter; Kadare; Jin; Rash; Self
Out this week: The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson; Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford; Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet; Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter; Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismail Kadare; A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin; Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash; and Shark by Will Self. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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China Miéville Interviewed by BLDGBLOG
BLDGBLOG, which has “always been interested in learning how novelists see the city,” interviewed China Miéville about “the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his… award-winning novel The City & The City,” among other things. Architects, fans of urban decay, and general lit nerds are going to have a field day with this link, I promise you.
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Susan Orlean’s Library Book
Year in Reading alum Susan Orlean’s next book will be entitled The Library Book. It will be “a love letter to an endangered institution, exploring their history, their people, their meaning and their future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.” The book will focus in particular on the unsolved 1986 razing of the Los Angeles Central Library.
Fairytales Revived
Fans of Hans Christian Andersen, a new edition of The Little Mermaid was published on Tuesday. Artist Yayoi Kusama has illustrated the classic fairytale.
Here is Filgate’s epiphany: “It’s better to find a balance and not think of your life as existing in 140 characters or status updates.”
Did she really need Dave Eggers to tell her that?
All of these practically religious reactions to what seems to me to be the least subtle, least profound book of the year make me feel, as someone who doesn’t use much social media, that I’ve drastically, devastatingly underestimated how much it dominates other people’s lives.
Seriously, has no one that uses social media ever considered that maybe spending five hours every day on Facebook and Twitter isn’t particularly healthy or productive?