World-building is an essential part of any story, but what about map-making? At Book Riot, two cartographers explain how they create the maps we see inside books. One cartographer’s perspective: “I really wanted to make a map that could easily be an artifact from the world of the book…. I came up with the idea that the map could be a page ripped from an atlas, and someone had written notes on it.” See also: Rob Goodman’s essay for the reader on world-building and its relationship to reality.
Lost in a Book
Ishiguro + Gaiman + Genre
“Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?” Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman discuss The Buried Giant, fantasy and genre for the New Statesman. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s review of the novel.
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Curiosities
Esquire offers up a terrific time sink, “The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine.” Included among these gems of long-form journalism, which are all reprinted in full, is Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” which appeared on the list of best sports journalism we ran last month.Not long ago, we discussed the books that first stoked our love for reading. The Guardian takes it one step further, asking “What were your favourite books before you could read?“A brief YouTube profile of Annette Gordon-Reed, National Book Award winner for The Hemingses of Monticello.From The Morning News, a slightly insane, moderately epic profile of Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir.Also from The Morning News, a bit about The Chicagoan, the long-lost New Yorker-esque magazine for the Second City, now memorialized in coffee-table book form. If ever any cities (besides New York of course) could be granted New Yorker-like magazines, Chicago and Los Angeles would be deserving. BoingBoing points to some pdf excerpts of the book.Poll watching savant Nate Silver takes execrable rabble-rouser John Ziegler to task for a dubious survey of Obama supporters. Petulance ensues.
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Kraus on Amazon
Exciting news: Jill Soloway (Transparent) is adapting Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick for Amazon. You could also check out Kraus’s Year in Reading.
Everything I Despise
Can you tell the difference between complaints by Jonathan Franzen and YouTube comments about the evils of saggy pants?
Sex, Drugs, and Anniversaries
“For that reason, it’s hard to imagine coming to this book for the first time, and experiencing it in the same way as that college senior back in 2003.” The Outline on the 15-year anniversary of Chuck Klosterman‘s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. (Read our review of the king of pop culture’s newest book.)
The Book Was Better
The Book Was Better is a podcast that “debates, discusses, and rips into the (often) hastily written and terrible book-of-the-film” adaptations for movies like Wild, Wild West, Hackers, The Net, and (try not to be upset by this one…) Jumanji. (Those episodes can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.)
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