The Guardian published a couple of fun pieces earlier this week. The first is a hilarious excerpt from Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. The second is a collection of the top ten most memorable meals in all of literature.
Heathcliff Whr R U
Meeting Mr. Jacobson
“A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday… a smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered.” A profile of the new Booker winner and an exploration of his winning book, The Finkler Question, in the New York Times.
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19th Century Gifs
When University of Iowa Special Collections librarian Colleen Theisen found hidden fore-edge paintings on a 19th century scientific book Autumn, she made a gif of it, of course. Then, she realized there were more secret paintings for each season and more gifs followed. Who said old books weren’t interactive?
But is he down with ELP?
Michael Chabon is really into prog rock. And I just picked up a couple of great Emerson Lake & Palmer LPs. So now I’ve got a soundtrack for reading Telegraph Avenue, which I’m especially stoked on after our own Michael Bourne’s review of the novel, devoted as I am to the “brilliant little brushstrokes of language.”
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Meet Ant-Roach
Meet Ant-Roach, an inflatable clackety six-legged robot with a protruding proboscis whose goal is to demonstrate the high strength-to-weight ratios of inflatable platforms. Can we say kid’s birthday parties?
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Tell Us Something We Don’t Know
Interested in writing a bestseller? You may want to check out Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers‘ newest book, The Bestseller Code. Or maybe not: “At times, it seems like Archer and Jockers are trying to retrofit a closed system. They found that best-sellers have lots of contractions—the better, they explain, to mimic contemporary speech—and exclamation points only rarely … They conclude that best-sellers consist of ‘shorter, cleaner sentences, without unneeded words,’ and that best-selling characters ‘make things happen.’ Active verbs predict best-sellers better than passive verbs. ‘Hesitation doesn’t keep pages turning,’ Archer and Jockers decide. After all that work, in other words, the algorithm ends up confirming the uncontested tenets of craft and style.”