“Exorbitant cost aside, if I can have the complete works of Shakespeare electronically beamed into my brain in under ten minutes, can I really say I’ve experienced Shakespeare? There is something organic about the experience of moving your eyeballs from left to right over an LCD screen in order to take in a sequence of marks the brain then must interpret as words, all the while using your hands to grip a lightweight, durable device.” Arguing for e-books over beaming text into your brain.
Direct Feed
Selling Marxism
An extremely rare copy of Karl Marx‘s Das Kapital sold at auction for $51,739 this past month. That’s more than five times as much as this extremely rare copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
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Harper Lee Will Publish a Sequel to “Mockingbird”
Harper announced today that To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee will publish a sequel to her famous novel this July. The sequel, titled Go Set a Watchman, was originally written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and features that book’s main character Scout as a grown woman. The book is Lee’s second novel, and the first she’s published since the 1950s.
Love – Love
“When the French would go to serve, they often said, Tenez!, the French word for ‘take it,’ meaning ‘coming at you, heads up.’ We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game ‘ten-ez’ by association. A lovely detail in that it suggests a scene, a Florentine ear at the fence or entryway, listening.” Whether it’s David Foster Wallace or John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about tennis, I’m reading it. Another three-namer, Jonathan Russell Clark, reviewed The David Foster Wallace Reader for The Millions.
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Novel-Gazers
According to a survey published in PLoS One between 1960 and 2008 there has been a steady increase in the use of words and phrases that emphasize self-absorption in books. This leads researchers to conclude that we’re growing more narcissistic.
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52 Years Since Lolita
52 years since Lolita: The Reader’s Almanac recounts the many publishers who turned down Nabokov’s masterpiece in 1953. From one rejection letter: “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” (via @ElectricLit)
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Books with Class
Season Three of Downton Abbey arrived on our shores last night, and if you’re interested in learning more about the show’s literary pedigree, our own Garth Risk Hallberg has you covered.
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Ta-Nahisi Coates’ bibliography
Earlier this month, Ta-Nahisi Coates published a conversation-changing long form article on race and reparations in The Atlantic (we covered other pundits’ responses here). Now, he is blogging a brief bibliography of the sources he consulted while writing that seminal essay. Parts one and two are available now, with two more installments planned for today and tomorrow. Whether or not you agree with Coates, it’s a fantastic reading list on race relations in America.
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