The idea of having to diagram a sentence still gives us nightmares, but Pop Chart Lab has diagrammed opening lines of famous novels, including those as simple as Slaughterhouse-Five and as complex as Don Quixote.
Beautiful Sentence Diagrams
Oldest-Ever Quran Unearthed
A Yemeni man claims to have unearthed the oldest copy of the Quran in the world. An inscription engraved on the manuscript’s first page indicates that it dates back to 815 AD.
Bob Dylan’s Paintings
Bob Dylan is in a little hot water amid allegations that his "original" paintings are actually rendered from other people's photographs.
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War and Peace a Bestseller
After 130 years, War and Peace is finally on the bestseller list. Pair with Edward Mullany’s piece on the second time he tried to read the book.
NYRB Classics Winter Sale
Have you taken advantage of NYRB Classics' Winter Sale yet? A whole bunch of their books are listed with 50% discounts! Why not check out The Radiance of the King, which was recommended this past Year in Reading by Deborah Eisenberg? (And also recommended by Junot Díaz back in our 2007 edition of the series, too.)
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The Poet’s Voice
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my husband’s American cousins, who have a five-year-old daughter. She is fascinated and confused by my ‘Briddish’ accent, which she seems to think at points is something I’m putting on. She invented a game where she’ll point at an object in the room and I have to say the word for it—Carpet! Dump truck!—in my best American accent (which is dreadful, by the way). This had her in stitches. When the laughter had died down, she turned to her parents, suddenly contemplative, and said, ‘Isn’t it amazing that Sarah knows a few words in our language?’” Lily Blacksell interviews T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe on how being in the U.S. changes her perception of language, writing in the first-person, and “authenticity.”
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