Jorge Louis Borges’s suggestions for the thirty-three books to begin his famed Library of Babel includes works by Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, and even Borges himself–and, maddeningly, no women. Nothing against Borges, but you may want to spend some time with our own slightly more diverse Year in Reading series for a bit more variety.
Borges’s Best-Of
For Tom Waits, Drink Everything
Do you like listening to music, but often struggle with an appropriate drink order? Enter Drinkify, a website which suggests cocktails based on the tunes you’re playing. (I tested it out with The Wu-Tang Clan. It told me to drink “1 bottle of gin.” Do with this information what you must.)
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What killed Jane Austen?
Using the only known painting of Jane Austen to try to find out what killed her.
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“I am thankful for death”
It’s fun to imagine what literary titans might have thought had they witnessed modern pop culture. In that vein, here is a monologue, delivered by T.S. Eliot, on seeing the play Cats for the first time.
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Gatsby That Almost Were
From Letters of Note, the correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor upon the former's completion of The Great Gatsby (including Fitzgerald's suggestion for an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby). In response to the many endings of A Farewell to Arms, Slate cooks up 48 canned, alternative endings for Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
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Captain Pentagon
"In the 1970s it circulated among Left Bank intellectuals, including Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as an aid to productive writing. In 1981 it was listed as a controlled substance in the US and in 1986, after it was scheduled under the WHO Convention on Psychotropic Substances, it was removed from prescription sale." The London Review of Books reviews two histories about the role of drugs in the fighting of wars, Blitzed: Drugs In the Third Reich by Norman Ohler and Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare by Łukasz Kamieński Hurst. Both pay particular attention to Captagon (the name a portmanteau of "captain" and "pentagon"), a pharmaceutical that has become common throughout Eastern Europe, the Gulf States, India, and China, and by 2014 "had become a significant source of funding for all sides in Syria’s civil war."
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