We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
Musical Theories
Reichenbach Pilgrimage
“I am lately returned from a pilgrimage, bearing bloodied knees and a holy relic; my destination was a place of love and sacrifice that’s lived long in my heart. No Lourdes for me, though: I went to the Reichenbach Falls.” Sarah Perry makes a pilgrimage to the death place of Sherlock Holmes and writes about it for the Guardian.
The Dark Side of Google
In the near future, Google may use your surrounding sights and sounds to help advertisers target you. Over at Gizmodo, Mat Honan eloquently argues against just this type of thing, and states that “the case against Google is for the first time starting to outweigh the case for it.”
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Paper Towns is Coming to Screen
The Fault in Our Stars isn’t even out yet, but John Green already has another adaptation on the way. Fox 2000 will bring Paper Towns to screen next with the same screenwriters and producers as The Fault in Our Stars. Green will also be producing. “If you don’t like something, you can blame me,” he tweeted. Fault supporting actor Nat Wolff will star as the sleuthing Quentin. We just want to know who will play the enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman.
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“In such circumstances, how could there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?”
Recommended Reading: People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s stunning essay on Reverend Kaneda, a Japanese monk performing exorcisms to solve his region’s “ghost problem.”
“We see these wounded women everywhere”
The latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review features Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” one of the most popular essays from her new collection, The Empathy Exams, which was reviewed for The Millions this past week.
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