Nabokov once claimed “there is no reading, only rereading.” In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks pursues the “key to rereading,” taking The Waste Land and Mrs. Dalloway as his test cases.
Why Reread?
Our Man in Croatia
Robert Perišic’s Our Man in Iraq made it onto the first installment of our Great 2013 Book Preview. A few weeks ago, Perišic sat down for an interview with John Feffer about ongoing changes in the author’s native Croatia, which recently acceded to the EU as its 28th member state.
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Eden Walk
“Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek discusses plans for his epic journey around the world and a groundbreaking experiment in slow journalism.”
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A Room of Her Own
Recommended Listening: Sandra Cisneros on moving into her first apartment and finding a room of her own.
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What the Bestseller List Says about 2017
Slate books and culture columnist Laura Miller looks at what this year’s bestseller list tells us about 2017. One of her conclusions, “2017 was the year that the very concept of a best-seller became even more dubious.” After reading her analysis, check out our Year in Reading lists, whose authors found joy in reading and viewed it as one of the few good things of this year, even if the bestsellers of the year didn’t reflect those feelings.
Big Books, Big Brains
We like big books and we cannot lie. But are books just continuing to get longer and longer? A new survey of bestsellers has concluded that the average book is now 25% bigger than its counterpart fifteen years ago. The Guardian investigates. Mark O’Connell at The Millions has his own theory about long books.
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The Equity Series Live
Year in Reading alum Vinson Cunningham will be in conversation with Darren Walker and Crystal Williams at MoMA next Friday, March 11 as a part of the Equity Series. Watch it on live-stream at 6:30 p.m. EST.
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Literature in Emojis
Slate has translated famous first lines of literature into emojis, and they’re surprisingly coherent. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark‘s essay on opening sentences.
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