“Why do we lust for lists?” Sandra M. Gilbert may not have an answer, but she does have a response to all those “100 Best American Novels” lists (and a list of her own). The Millions has a few lists too, of course – be sure to check out Janet Potter‘s “28 Books You Should Read If You Want To.”
A Lust for Lists
Under the Bonzai
Here’s a thing you’ve probably never thought of before: the sheer weirdness of some of the Christmas rituals in many canonical children’s books. In The Irish Times, Rosita Boland catalogues a few of the stranger ones, including Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Christmas dinner in summer and Lucy’s gift of a dagger in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
“I was sad as I began to think that I might be gay.”
Recommended Listening: Andrew Solomon’s Moth story, “My Post-Nuclear Family.” (Solomon’s work has previously been shouted out in our Year in Reading series by Millions staffers Hannah Gersen and Edan Lepucki.)
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Balance of Power: Grossman and Beha, Reader and Writer
Lev Grossman‘s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” drew an interesting collection of comments, as well as a considered response from Christopher Beha at n+1.
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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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One Of Us, One Of Us
“But even among its peers, Louie is an outlier. It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club…we are living in the iGeneration, in which the self is projected back toward the world via social media. But whereas many Americans weave their public personas from curated chains of cultural signifiers — think of the popular web platform tumblr, where users ‘express themselves’ by posting digital reproductions of existing images — [Louis] C.K. aims for something more penetrating, a filmic representation of his own psyche,” claims the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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