Chances are you’ve bragged about the size of your library. The number of books you own is a point of pride for many readers. But at what point does collecting books — which few people would say is a bad thing– turn into a problem? At what point, in other words, does it become hoarding? Pair with: Rebecca Rego-Barry on hunting for rare books at college library book sales.
Bookshelves Ten Feet High
Neither Magical, nor Realism; Discuss…
The New Republic is, to put it mildly, not chuffed about the new Isabel Allende.
Tuesday New Release Day: Donoghue; Vásquez; McBride; Raboteau; Olds; Bishop
New this week: The Wonder by Emma Donoghue; Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez; The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride; American Prophets by Albert J. Raboteau; Odes by Sharon Olds; and The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
The Real Racist
One thing that pretty much everyone can agree on is that Go Set a Watchman is a controversial book. Our own Michael Bourne said it “fails as a work of art in every way except as a corrective to the standard sentimental reading of Atticus Finch.” At Slate, Dan Kois, Meghan O’Rourke and Katy Waldman debate the main questions the novel raised.
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Jonathan Lethem’s New York
At The Rumpus, Richard Greenwald writes about the novels of Jonathan Lethem, urban gentrification, and the Sisyphean feat of achieving authenticity in New York.
Tiphanie Yanique on the Destruction and Blessing of Love
Burroughs’s curse, Capote’s burden
“Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else.” And other things William Burroughs’s wrote to Truman Capote. There’s a bit more backstory over at RealityStudio, though the letter stands on its fearsome and indignant own.
Me and my husband have a library at home almost full of books. On every trip that we make it is a policy to bring a book back home. I don’t think we’ll have a problem using the stairs as a bookcase when the library is full. I don’t believe in the phrase: “I have too many books” … There is and always will be space for books around us; it’ll never become hoarding to us :)
My parents are always nagging me about all the books I have. He doesn’t read much, and she has me check a book out from the library if she wants to read something specific. Neither of them care that I want books mostly to have the information, and many of my books are either the only copy I’ve every come across, library sell-offs (negates the “borrow it from the library” argument) or both.
Still, it’s annoying they take up so much space. I’ve compared late 20th-Century printings with 19th- and early 20th-Century copies and concluded modern publishers put a lot of unnecessary whitespace in their page design. And then they’ve got the balls to whine about production costs. Must think everyone buys books by the yard.