This week, Football Book Club will be reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and posting essays about Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn — its selection from last week — and life without the NFL. Going Clear was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and has been turned into a documentary by HBO.
Football Book Club: Lawrence Wright’s ‘Going Clear’
Julian Assange Opens for M.I.A.
Now this is one of the strangest things to happen at a concert in a while: M.I.A. kicked off her tour to promote her new album Matangi by getting Julian Assange to open for her at Terminal 5. The Wikileaks founder spoke to the audience via Skype.
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Bookshelf of the Masses
From Jared Fanning, a charming graphic of the world’s 10 most read books.
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Ada Limón on Reading Ray Bradbury in High School
"I had never read stories like this." Ada Limón on being given Ray Bradbury's The October Country by her high school English teacher.
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“Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk”
Recommended Reading: “Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1981)” by Campbell McGrath, one of the best poets in South Florida.
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One Book, Two Covers
“What do these two books have in common?…Open each cover and you will only find similarities: They are the same book.” For The Globe and Mail, our own Claire Cameron writes about one book being marketed with two different covers and titles to appeal to different audiences. Pair with: an essay about book covers featuring headless, backless women, and another on the beauty of typewritten book covers.
We Can Get Behind This
We would be remiss not to mention this new ‘Fifty Shades of Muppet’ trailer. Pair with our own essay on literary predecessors in published fan fiction.
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Eat Your Heart Out, James Patterson
Meet Philip M. Parker, a marketing professor at INSEAD Business School and the man whose name graces the covers of over 100,000 books. Is he the most prolific author of the modern age? Well, kind of. Thanks to “a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes,” Parker and his company have combined to create over 800,000 titles currently listed on Amazon – including such works as The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Spinal Stenosis and Webster’s Icelandic – English Thesaurus Dictionary.
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