As if the guy needs any additional distractions to keep him from writing the seventh (or eighth!) books in his Song of Ice and Fire series, George R. R. Martin recently decided to join Twitter. If he ends book six with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, then I presume you’ll know why.
#Dragons and #TheWall
From Well-Read to Well-Written
Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community celebrating “the uniqueness of Black literature & sisterhood,” has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its inaugural writers’ conference and festival. Past WRBG book club guests include Year in Reading alums Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Flournoy, whom we also interviewed about her debut novel The Turner House.
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
Or the Link
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The Girl Who Continued A Series Posthumously
Stieg Larsson’s Swedish publishers have hired David Lagercrantz to write a fourth novel in the best-selling Millennium trilogy. Lagercrantz’s last book was a biography of soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
The Same Grace
“I do not wish to presume. I want to love. Oh God please make my mind clear.” It’s no secret that Flannery O’Connor was both an incredible writer and a devout Catholic. The New Yorker has just published a few excerpts from her Prayer Journal which are characteristically beautiful whether or not you’re a believer.
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“An index also lays out the complexity of the book into pristine statements”
In a neat little essay for Vouched Books, Kyle Winkler advocates indexing as a means of tempering the “fuckstorm of reading.”
Food for the Hungry
Recommended Reading: On the implications of “devouring” literature.
Books vs. “Books”
Recommended reading: Alex Beam on the distinction between books and “books.”
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