With the advent of e-readers, books on the subway are getting harder and harder to spot. It takes dedication to get a sense of what people are reading these days. At The Awl, Ben Dolnick sets out to catalogue a week’s worth of sightings, which included a man reading Cloud Atlas and The Stranger and a teenage girl reading Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. You could also read our own Nick Moran on the question of whether e-readers are really green.
Book Sightings
Where In The World Is That Book Going?
The Book Depository is “the UK’s largest dedicated online bookseller,” which is all well and good, but their live visualization of which customers are ordering what (and from where) might be the best part of the entire website.
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#OccupyGaddis
Over at the LARB blog, Lee Konstantinou is heading up a summer reading group for William Gaddis’s J R. To participate, just tag your tweets or Tumblr posts #OccupyGaddis.
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Writerly Humility
“I couldn’t tell if a poem I was writing would come to anything or not until the last line was there. That’s always been my method. I may have revised less than some other poets, but I think I write as much crap as anyone.” Kaveh Akbar interviews Sharon Olds about inspiration, contemporary poetry, and rejection letters for Divedapper. Pair with this Millions piece, featuring seven editors looking back on their rejection styles.
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Near to the wild heart
A charming doodle of the beautiful connecting covers for mid Clarice Lispector’s four soon-to-be-released novels. You can also buy a poster of the original from New Directions. And given how much Carolyn Kellogg enjoyed them, mentally shelving the Brazilian author beside Kafka and Joyce, and of course based on the near infinite readability of The Hour of the Star, I’m wondering if this will be the year of Lispector.
Sic
We’ve published essays before on the importance of good grammar, but it’s rare that something comes along that illustrates its value so clearly. A couple weeks ago, the Times published a blurb about This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a recent essay collection by Ann Patchett, that led to the author sending in what may be the best correction of all time. For more on Patchett’s work, you could read Kevin Charles Redmon on her book State of Wonder.
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The Stanford Letters
“I’m annoyed that so many young rapists lack interest in their own motivations, or are led to believe that an absence of real psychic motive will make the crime merely an act, when really it’s the uninterested mereness of the act that makes it feel, to some victims, so criminal.” Sarah Nicole Prickett compares the many letters released following Brock Turner’s trial at n+1.
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